


Moebius Time

by Guede



Series: Edge [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Western, Blood Drinking, Control Issues, Culture Shock, Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Incest, M/M, Manipulative Relationship, Mental Coercion, Period-Typical Racism, Racist Language, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Self-Hatred, Time Travel, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:15:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 39,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27918838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Four months after John's death, Dean and Sam are still trying to cope when a spell accidentally sends them and Luther back in time...to a haunted, violent frontier Kansas.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Luther (Supernatural: Dead Man's Blood)/Dean Winchester, Luther (Supernatural: Dead Man's Blood)/Sam Winchester
Series: Edge [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2036881
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	1. Bleeding Kansas

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted to LiveJournal in 2006.

“I can’t believe you did that!”

The car slammed to a stop so that Sam came within a couple inches of going through the windshield. He only kept himself from it by ramming his arm against the dashboard, and since less than an hour earlier, he’d been using that arm to fend off a pack of giant black hounds, that put him in a lot of pain. It was a good thing nothing else happened, since he couldn’t have done anything about it; he slumped over and cradled his elbow, cursing.

“He was a second away from putting a crossbow bolt through your head. You can heal from that, but it takes months and in the meantime, you’re a vegetable. And maybe he would’ve put one through your heart next,” Luther snarled, banging around in the backseat. It sounded like he was kicking the hell out of the floor, which wasn’t going to earn him any points with Dean.

Of course, his account with Dean was way into the red anyway, and from the way Dean was poised to lunge over the top of the seat and into the back, it was in grave danger of being forcibly closed out. “Oh, don’t act like you did it for my sake. You should’ve knocked the goddamn crossbow away from him.”

Long silence. “If I hadn’t killed him, then the dogs would have as soon as Sam had finished breaking the spell.”

“Then that’s fine. He would’ve deserved it,” Dean snapped. He angrily twisted again and again, trying to get all the way around, but something wasn’t letting him. “That’s how it should’ve gone.”

This time, the pause wasn’t silent. If Sam didn’t know better, he might’ve thought there was an enraged bull in the backseat from the loud, harsh, fast breaths. “Dean. What’s the difference between me killing him and the dogs killing him? At least if I kill him, I get to _eat_.”

“Well, right _there_ would be the problem.” Dean’s voice had gone flat and cold, with a dangerous tension humming through the undertone.

“What, that I’m a vampire? Or that you didn’t get to eat, too? Seeing as you have the same appetites.” Luther, on the other hand, had opted for a deceptively soft, curling tone, given the hardness of his meaning.

They were doing it again and if Sam didn’t say something, he wasn’t going to get a break because he’d be busy trying to get between two extremely strong vampires. Which basically was right where they’d like him, and God, sometimes he almost hated both of them for that. Maybe they couldn’t help it, maybe it was their fucked-up instincts and primal urges and whatever, but that didn’t make it any easier on him, and _he_ didn’t have those to blame things on.

“I’ll—” Dean started, jerking up.

“ _Stop it_ ,” Sam hissed. He reached out and yanked Dean back down by the arm. “Can we just get to the damn motel?”

Dean twisted free of Sam’s grip. He put his hands back on the wheel, but didn’t make a move towards the gearshift. “So you’re okay with killing people now?”

“It’s not like we haven’t, and no, I’m not agreeing with him. I’m just pointing out that it’s happened and it’s not a simple argument and God, I don’t want to do this now. I just want to get to a place where I can lock myself in the bathroom and not have to listen to you two fight it out of your systems.” A migraine was rapidly developing, and Sam hadn’t even called on his stupid powers once today. He pressed his knuckles into his forehead, catching the bridge of his nose in between two, and let himself sink down so his heels dragged deep grooves in the carpeting.

The grumbling of the engine kept things from getting too quiet, but it didn’t do much to cover up the strained feeling. “What?” Dean asked after a moment.

“He ate, you haven’t—let’s just go and you can get your feed off him, and then maybe we can talk,” Sam muttered. The less he had to think about what happened during that, the better chance he stood of not killing either of the others.

“Not likely.” Though Dean finally shifted the car back into ‘drive’ and pulled back into the road. No, it wasn’t, but the least he could do was wait till Sam was in shape to deal with it.

Of course, that wasn’t likely to happen any time soon either, Sam moodily thought. Once Dean had been strong enough, they’d concentrated on trying to find out more about the strange powers-blocking amulet the demon had been trying to get onto Sam. It’d been pretty good for keeping their minds off Dad—but then the trail had turned towards Kansas, and everything had been sliding downhill ever since. Pretty amazing, considering Sam had thought they’d already hit rock-bottom.

* * *

The moment they pulled up, Sam was out and slamming into the room with his stuff. Dean glanced after him, then sighed and hauled himself out of the car. A second bang made him start, but it was only Sam and the bathroom door.

“You probably should’ve had some of him,” Luther said. He’d already gotten out and was reaching into the back for a bag.

He was damn lucky Dean needed a moment to close the driver’s door and that was long enough for Dean to realize Luther had been referring to the hoodoo master they’d just killed and not to Sam. Not that Dean was real inclined to calm down afterward, but he did have to admit he couldn’t kill Luther yet. “Shut up.”

“He’d raped and killed at least five women around there, and you still have a problem with him getting drained? It’s not like the police would’ve been able to charge him with any of those.” Luther hefted the bag up onto the top of the car, then backed off so he could close the door.

One of the bag’s buckles hit the car with a loud clank. Dean snatched up the bag, then rubbed one hand over the car top, feeling for scratches. He didn’t find any, but that still didn’t do much for his temper. “Shut _up_.”

Right then Luther closed the door, which was a bad move on his part since it’d been a reasonably good barrier between them. Hi-beams from the nearby highway kept hitting his eyes so they’d fluoresce green and that was about all Dean could see of his face. He still smelled like blood; it was dry and stale by now but it was enough to make Dean’s mouth water. He’d had enough to have a pulse Dean could feel in his teeth, a low, maddening throb that only got worse when Dean bit down.

“Oh, right. That’s not the actual problem, is it?” Luther hissed. “That’s just your excuse.”

Dean jerked his fingers into fists, thinking that he was just going to ignore the son of a bitch and walk on by. He’d go inside and talk to Sam and then they’d figure out how they were getting the rest of the way to—to Lawrence. Yeah, he’d do that.

He bounced once on his toes, then jerked the bag off his shoulder. It dropped on his feet and slightly tripped him up as he lunged forward, but he’d been aiming to slam Luther up against the side of the car, so that wasn’t a problem for long. His knee hit the car and he dug his fingers into Luther’s arms and shoulder to keep up; nails raked down Dean’s back, but the leather of his coat kept him from feeling much of that. And then his mouth was straddling the pulse in Luther’s neck, and all the _life_ in that, the jumping fierceness of it, was flooding him and God, it was so _good_.

He could feel it making his knees tremble, could feel his stomach filling up as if he’d actually broken the skin. Heat exploded in his gut and quickly spread to soften his whole body, turning it loose and lax, though when Luther jerked his neck away a fraction, Dean was yanking himself up and pressing hard before an eye could’ve blinked. A groan squeezed out of him, forcing him to back off himself, and the space that opened up between them was all ache. But then he was back in and hooked and pushing his hips up and _that_ was it.

It faded fast, leaving him reeling with disgust. He caught himself on the rearview window, then was bent over by a sharp, violent burst of coughing. The blood-taste in his mouth now was sour and nauseating, and the stickiness inside of his jeans was turning clammy against his skin.

“If you just drank blood, you wouldn’t have to do that. Wouldn’t that be better?” Luther asked, voice harsh and unsteady. He pushed himself off the car, then sank back, propping himself up on his elbows. The headlights of a car going down the highway caught him on the side of the face, flashing bone-white skin at Dean.

“Don’t talk to me about what’s good for me.” Dean kept his head down. He still felt too dizzy to walk, though the restless, touchy edge to his temper had temporarily been dulled.

After a few moments, Luther leaned off the car again. His hand came down to scoop up the bag Dean had dropped, and then he went inside.

It was another minute before Dean thought he could stand straight. He locked the car and followed the footprints Luther had left in the dusty ground. The bathroom door was closed, but Sam was sitting on the nearer bed, laptop out and maps spread around him. He glanced up when Dean was locking the door, then jerked his head towards the bathroom just as the muffled spray of the shower started. “Luther’s cleaning himself up.”

Bastard couldn’t even let Dean borrow the sink for a couple minutes first, could he. There was a tissue box on the dresser, but Sam was in the room.

“Lawrence was a pretty big stop along the trail to Nevada and California, so it had silversmiths and assayers,” Sam said. He was awkwardly hunched over, and way more than he really needed to be in order to see the screen. Then he shot an uneasy, apologetic look at Dean, and Dean got it.

Really nice of him, but it was the kind of nice that made the bad taste in Dean’s mouth worse. He yanked out a couple tissues, then turned towards the wall to undo his fly. “So we have to go back there.”

“Yeah. Eventually. There’s a ghost town I want to stop at first: Pawnee.” Lots of angry clicking.

Dean twisted his wrist around and forced it down his pant-leg to scrub off the last splatters. Then he wriggled his arm out and bundled up the tissues in his hand so he could zip up again. He winced at that noise. “What’s the deal with Pawnee?”

“Well, it was the capitol of the Kansas-Nebraska territory for five days, which is a record for the shortest time. Got plowed over during the Border War, but there’s a local legend that says a couple nights a year, you can see it like it was—like a ghostly flashback,” Sam muttered. When Dean turned around, the other man practically had his nose in the keyboard, he was trying so hard to give Dean some privacy.

Just behind Dean’s breastbone, things got tight and painful. He gritted his teeth and ignored it while he searched around for the trashcan, finally finding it beneath the desk. “Border War?”

“Did you pay attention to any state history, or do I have to go over all of that? The Bloody Kansas thing—when they were fighting over whether slavery would be legal in the state or not.” Sam warily glanced over the top of the screen. When he saw Dean had finished up, he relaxed a little and flopped into a less bone-straining position. Then he sniffed and jerked over to glare at Dean. “Damn it, open the window if you’re going to torch the trash. The last thing I need is for you to set off the smoke alarm. Besides, how are you going to put that out when you’re done? You don’t have any water.”

“Stop breaking my balls, would you? Alarm’s not going off yet, and—hey, look, it’s Luther.” Dean picked up the trashcan—the flames weren’t even big enough to get over the rim—and shoved it so Luther had to take it. Then he turned around and stalked back over to Sam.

After a second, he heard the bathroom door slam again, and then the sound of running water. Sam looked towards it, then gave Dean an irritated look. “Didn’t you two get things settled outside? It sure as hell sounded like it.”

“I made sure I’m not going to chomp on your neck while you’re sleeping. You think I can take care of any of that other crap in two minutes, and—fuck it,” Dean snarled, kicking off his shoes. He scooped up a handful of maps, then sat down on the space he’d cleared. “Look, I’m not going to be friends with that asshole.”

“And I’m not asking you to be. I just want you to stop—” Sam cut himself off so sharply that the remainder of his sentence, whatever it was, hissed through his teeth. Then he turned and went back to staring at the computer.

He didn’t have to say anyway, since Dean could guess. And Dean wished he could make that stop. He really did, because that was about the worst of the whole mess; it went and it took everything he and Sam had—everything Dean had left in the world—and it made it into something repulsive.

“Sorry,” Sam mumbled. He squeezed his eyes shut. “I know, I know, it just comes with the vampirism.”

“Yeah, well, I’m still sorry you have to put up with it.” Dean pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and rubbed hard, then put his hands down. He moved more maps out of the way so he could lie down and check out whatever Sam had on the computer. “Okay. Bloody Kansas. How’s this important again?”

Sam started to answer, but was interrupted by the bathroom door opening. The damp, slightly stinging smell of ashes preceded Luther, who kicked the trashcan out. Then he started to shut the door again, but noticed something and looked over. A lot of sarcasm seemed to want to get out, but he kept himself to just saying: “I’m rinsing the bloodstains out of my clothes. Did you want to use the shower yet?”

“No, I’m fine,” Dean replied, wrapping his words in razors. He watched till Luther closed the door, then turned back to Sam.

His brother was looking at him with a strange, not-quite-irritated expression. But Sam shrugged and twisted away before Dean could tell exactly what it was. “Bloody Kansas doesn’t have much to do with it, I think. Except maybe because things were really violent back then, so the demon had a lot of negative energy to feed off of, and it could get more done.”

“Like having that charm-thing made?” Dean asked, relieved to go back to a relatively neutral subject. He folded his arms, then put his chin down on top of them.

“There was a famous silversmith named Brown working in Pawnee—a couple of his pieces are in the Smithsonian. But he ended up lynched in eighteen-forty-eight…” Sam glanced meaningfully at Dean “…for supposed witchcraft.”

“No kidding. What kind?” The computer screen was at some local history website. After reading the first couple of paragraphs, which were all about the hardships early settlers faced, Dean got bored and turned his head so he could rest his cheek on his arms. He watched Sam scroll down to a fuzzy sepia photograph of a dirt street with lots of Wild-West storefronts and a horse-cart.

Sam put one hand down and pushed so he could go from sitting on his knees to sitting cross-legged. Then he closed that window and pulled up another one, which was dominated by the photo of a man, who seemed pretty nondescript except for his eyes: they were dark and eerie, and it almost looked as if they were all black, with no iris or whites. Brown, according to the caption. “Two black men were caught performing a ‘hexing’ to kill this local merchant that they owed money to. They were using silver bowls decorated with ‘clear symbols of devil-worship’ that they said they’d gotten from Brown. Given the time period, they might’ve been framed, but the townspeople didn’t really care. They hung all three men on the same night.”

Dean sucked in air hard through his teeth, grateful that at least he lived in the twenty-first century. It was better dealing with people’s disbelief than…that. “But you think Brown at least might’ve been really guilty?”

“Worth a check. I found a photo of his stuff that’s in the Smithsonian, and…see, look here.” Switch to another window showing a photo of a heavy, ornate silver candlestick. Then Sam zoomed in. “See that little mark? That’s how silversmiths signed their work. The same thing’s on the charm.”

A circle with a…no, it was a triangle in the middle and not a star, but for a moment the back of Dean’s neck had prickled. He shook it off and memorized the symbol. “Okay. But why Pawnee? You think you’re gonna dig up Brown’s diary or something after all this time?”

“Probably not, but maybe we could raise _him_ and ask about it. He should still be buried there,” Sam offhandedly said, like séances were no big deal. He knew better. He definitely knew better, because he was refusing to look at Dean.

Dean jabbed his elbow into Sam’s leg. When that didn’t work, he turned over on one elbow and grabbed Sam’s arm to give him a good shake. “Sammy? No.”

“God, Dean, teenage girls do it all the time with their Ouija boards—”

“And what happens? They mess up and it turns into a case for us, doesn’t it? Besides, if this guy Brown’s really linked to the demon, then he’s not exactly going to be a normal ghost, is he? Have you even thought about that?” Dean snapped. He jerked at Sam’s arm hand and that finally got his brother looking at him. Yeah, Sam was pissed off, but so what? “This is practically _necromancy_. That’s definitely not white magic.”

Sam glared at Dean for a moment, then turned away to stare sullenly at the far well. “Well, the high road’s not exactly working, is it? It’s been four months since…since Dad and we haven’t really learned anything new.” He winced and looked at Dean again. “I have checked around. There’s nothing useful in the documentation for that time and place—the only way we can know the truth is if we ask him. There’s literally no other reference to go to here.”

“Maybe you just haven’t looked in enough places—” Dean started to push himself up and off the bed.

His shoulder got grabbed, and once Sam had yanked him back around, Sam got hold of Dean’s jaw, making him look at his brother. “Maybe,” Sam grated out. “But how much time do you think we have? My nightmares are getting worse all the damn time.”

Dean opened his mouth to retort and couldn’t come up with anything. He closed it and looked down—Sam was still forcing his head up, so that was awkward as hell—then sighed. “I don’t like—”

“I researched the ritual we’d need so much that I’m starting to dream about the damn thing. I can do it, and it’s not going to get me possessed or anything. Really. I swear.” Sam loosened up his grip on Dean’s shoulder, suddenly looking very tired. He tried to smile at Dean. “If I’m wrong, you can kick my ass, okay?”

“You know, I don’t even really like joking about that now,” Dean muttered. He let the weight of his head fall against Sam’s hand, taking some comfort in its warmth. There were calluses and tiny scars all over Sam’s palm, but they felt good rubbing against his cheek, and besides, to him Sam smelled like home, which was the closest he could get to that now.

The hand on Dean’s shoulder slid down to press against its front in warning, and Dean knew perfectly well what about, but he just—Sam smelled _good_. He’d already eaten and he was fine. It wasn’t that so much as—he pressed his face harder into Sam’s hand, turning it and his mouth barely brushed Sam’s wrist before Sam suddenly jerked away. Some kind of low, soft protesting noise came out Dean’s mouth, a sound he could barely recognize as coming from himself, and he’d snatched Sam’s arm and tried to yank his brother back before he really knew what he was doing.

A sharp edge pricked at his throat and he jerked himself to a stop with his head about two inches from Sam’s neck. He was still, but Sam wasn’t and the knife jittered up and down Dean’s Adam’s apple, scraping hard but not breaking the skin yet. Sam was breathing almost as hard as Dean was, and oh, _God_.

After a moment, Dean managed to get hold of himself. He pried his fingers off of Sam’s arm and pulled backward; it took a second for Sam to get it and let go. When he did, Dean scooted away and got entirely off the bed. He couldn’t look at Sam yet, so he just stood around, jiggling his foot. “Sorry. I’m—Sam, I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” Sam muttered. And he did, and he forgave Dean for it—that was in his voice—and Dean just wished he were dead. “Um. Maybe…”

“I need a shower,” Dean said, pretty much blurting it out. Which made them both fucking wince. He shook out of it, then went over to the bathroom while he still could get himself to do that. To hell with Luther being in there; it was easier not to kill him than to ignore how badly Dean wanted to press his mouth to his own brother’s skin and drink in that life.

* * *

Since the whole sunlight-daytime issue was a problem for both Dean and Luther, they mostly traveled at night and in the early morning now. Dean still managed to have a pretty good tan when he’d fed enough, but Sam had gotten pretty freakishly pale. He turned his hand over in the weak dawn light slanting over the dashboard and frowned at it, wondering how long it’d be before people started commenting. It probably wouldn’t have been too bad near the coasts, but in Kansas—especially rural Kansas—he was going to stick out like a sore thumb.

Somebody knocked at the window. Sam jumped and jerked his hand down beneath the wheel, then twisted around to see Luther at the front passenger side. He glanced around, but didn’t see Dean anywhere. Luther apparently guessed what he was thinking and glanced sideways, his shoulders heaving in an exasperated sigh.

Well, it wasn’t exactly what Sam wanted to do, but they were parked out on a public street and there wasn’t a reason to keep Luther outside. He clicked off the lock, then waved at the door. Then he twisted around, propping his arm up on the side of the window. The door opened, the seat creaked, the door closed.

“No luck with the county records?” Sam asked.

Papers rustled and something tan-colored intruded into Sam’s field of vision. He took the folder and flipped it open one-handed. Inside were only a few photocopied sheets.

“Not really. Can I ask a question?” Luther slouched down to get as far away from the light as possible. He pushed at some wisps of hair that were in his eyes, then reached back and pulled his whole ponytail loose to redo it. “Where are we going in Kansas?”

The sheets didn’t look too useful, so Sam closed up the folder again and stuck it in the bag flopped over his feet. He checked his watch: the place Dean was breaking into was farther away, but he still should’ve been back by now. “Pawnee. Then Lawrence.”

When Luther answered, there was an odd little hitch in his voice. “There, huh. Well. That wasn’t too difficult.”

“What?” Sam stretched his legs out as far as they’d go, but even then his knees were bumping the underside of the wheel. His left calf was beginning to cramp up.

Luther made a noncommittal noise. He stared at his hands for a second, then reached for the door handle like he was going to get out.

“Where are you going?” Sam asked

“The backseat. I actually don’t enjoy arguing with your brother, so I thought I’d skip that this morning,” Luther muttered.

That seemed okay, but—“What’d you mean by ‘that wasn’t too difficult’? I’m sorry, are we making life hard for you? Did you want to file a complaint?”

After a second, Luther dropped back into his seat. Hard. The car rattled so a couple crossing the street ahead of them briefly stopped to look. “I just like knowing where I’m going. Which you usually don’t mention to me.”

“Well, you got into this because we thought you could actually point us in the right direction, but so far you’ve been pretty useless,” Sam said, just a hair short of snarling. He checked his watch again. If Dean didn’t show in another five minutes, he was driving over.

“I know about the damned demon. I don’t know about jewelry—is that why we’re going to Lawrence?” For some reason, that definitely disturbed Luther. He put his hand to his mouth and bit at the side of his finger, then pulled it down. Then he put it back.

Sam thought for a couple minutes, but he couldn’t remember ever telling Luther that they were from Lawrence, and he couldn’t think of any reason why Dean or…or Dad would’ve mentioned it either. He considered the chance that Luther was just baiting him, but Luther seemed genuinely uneasy. “Why?”

“Lawrence might’ve gotten a demon visitation back in eighteen-sixty-three. It was hard to tell; Quantrill rampaged through the place and burned most of it down,” Luther said after a long moment. He still looked as if something was bothering him. “But before that, in eighteen-fifty-six…never mind, that wasn’t demon-related.”

“You sure?” Eighteen-fifty-six…Sam rifled through his memory and came up thinking John Brown, but couldn’t quite figure out why. Then he had it—that year a pro-slavery band had raided Lawrence, and then John Brown had gone around hacking guys to death a couple days later. Didn’t seem too relevant at first glance.

Luther slid a challenging look over at Sam. Then he settled back with a snort. “Yeah. That was the first time a hunter caught up with me. And—that ended up complicated, but it was mostly me trying not to die, so you probably aren’t interested in that,” he drawled, tone faintly sarcastic. He glanced out the window. “Dean’s coming.”

“What?” Sam jerked up and squinted past Luther, then sat back down. Dean was on the other side of the parking lot, but he’d be across it in less than a minute.

By the time Sam sat down, Luther was already halfway out of the car. He left the front door open and got into the backseat; thirty seconds later, Dean was ducking into the front seat. He glanced suspiciously between the two of them. “What were you two doing?”

“Talking,” Sam said.

“Irritating him,” Luther said. He didn’t sound like he particularly cared how anyone reacted to it, but that had to be a put-on. He slid down so far that Sam couldn’t see him in the rearview mirror any more.

Dean looked back and forth one last time, then finally turned forward with an explosive exhale. He drummed his fingers on the side of the window as he passed over a manila file. “Whatever. Are we done here?”

“Yeah.” Sam reached for the keys.

* * *

Pawnee, Kansas. The dust stuck in Dean’s throat and stung his eyes as he leaned against the side of the Impala, smelling the earthy-sweet grass spiked through with gasoline fumes. Those were all from their car, since he could smell that nobody else had been around here in years. Decades.

The farthest border of the town had been overtaken by the neighboring Fort Riley, but most of the new development seemed to be on the other side. They were leaving the main part of Pawnee the hell alone.

“Looks like shit.” Luther grabbed a double handful of his coat and pulled it up, then squatted down to poke at the dirt. He sniffed a few times, then scooped up a good pinch of dirt and slowly let it stream down from between his fingers, intently watching it. “Not even any glass left.”

“From what?” Dean asked. He shivered as a passing breeze stroked across his back, then kicked at the dirt. He looked up and around at the buildings, which weren’t more than a few broken-down fences of weathered, gray wood here and there. None of them had any roofs left, and in most places it was hard to tell where the original buildings stopped and started.

Sam was back at the motel, waiting for them to get on with it and scope out the place so they could come back tomorrow night and talk to the dead. That would be the creepy part, but just standing here was giving Dean the chills. Bad enough for him to not even be getting pissed off by Luther. Okay, the place had a reputation for being haunted, but that wasn’t it.

“From broken bottles, windows, a hundred other things,” Luther muttered. He got back up and slowly turned around. “This was Main Street.”

“You were here, too?” Somehow that didn’t surprise Dean in the least.

Luther nodded, but didn’t seem any more inclined to start poking around and try to find the silversmith’s store. It was night, nothing living that was bigger than a coyote was hanging about, and Dean wasn’t getting any kind of weird ping, but he still didn’t want to go in any of those buildings.

They just stood there for a couple minutes like idiots, staring at the goddamn buildings. It certainly wasn’t the most menacing place Dean had ever been, but—

“What’s wrong with it?” Luther abruptly asked, looking over at Dean.

Dean blinked. “What?”

“What’s _wrong_ with it? Why is it—” The hand gestures Luther made were certainly expressive of his frustration and confusion, but didn’t do a damn thing to explain his question.

“How the hell should I know? I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Dean snapped. He kicked at the ground, wishing he could shoot at something.

The wind blew. Grass rustled. Coyotes howled. The goddamn buildings mocked Dean in their…their dilapidated stillness.

“Why I think it’s a real lousy idea to go over and walk around those walls and I don’t know why, and why you seem to be agreeing with me. Are you picking up anything?” Luther finally said. A small snap behind them made him look sharply around, but it seemed to be no big deal, so Dean didn’t look.

“If you’re not picking up anything, then why would I pick up anything?” Dean gritted his teeth. There was _nothing_ in those goddamn buildings.

He hesitated a moment longer, then pushed off the car and stalked towards the nearest wall, cursing himself up one side and Luther down the other. It took him about forty-five seconds to get there, and he didn’t get jumped or even ruffled, so maybe it was all him and he was just turning into a basketcase.

“Because you’re a different breed of vampire and different sensitivities seem to come with that?” Luther hurried after Dean, but stayed about a yard wide and slightly behind. He also paused occasionally, and when Dean took a look over his shoulder, he caught Luther staring uneasily at the ground.

“I’m not a _breed_. There’s no fucking more of me coming,” Dean snarled. He walked along the wall till he came to an opening, then ducked through it.

It was a pretty good-sized room, with even a shelf left on the wall and some floor planks piled up in one corner, but it didn’t have anything to say what it’d been used for. A hole in the back led to another, smaller room, but that didn’t have anything helpful ei—wait a minute. God, Dean was letting his nerves get to him. He smacked himself on the side of the head, then whirled about to face Luther.

“You said you’d been here before. So where was Brown’s silversmith store?” he demanded.

Luther had been in the process of slipping through the front…hole. He still looked uncomfortable, taking a lot of care to not touch anything; he even bundled his coat close so it wouldn’t graze the edges of the hole. “I was here before, but that was in the eighteen-twenties. It wasn’t even a town—didn’t have a real bar. There was this trading post where you sold furs and buffalo chips and bought your drinks. I don’t remember any silversmith.”

“Buffalo chips.” Wasn’t that another way to say buffalo shit? What would anyone want with that?

“This is Kansas, Dean. You saved your wood for your house and burned that, or you set the whole damn prairie on fire,” Luther muttered. He edged across the space to look at something on the wall. “Well, they did get a bar sometime. These are the holes where the ends of the counter would’ve been set in.”

Dean rolled his eyes and stomped over to a gap in the wall about four feet left of Luther, going into the next building. “Fucking great. Who needs cable when you’ve got the fucking History Channel in your head?”

He heard Luther half-suppress an irritated sigh, but just kept on going. Let Luther be annoyed; he could sulk while Dean got the work done so they could get back to Sam already.

Of course, Luther liked to get on Dean’s nerves and didn’t sulk, but instead followed after and made comments about what that fragment of wall molding meant, or that well in the back said about the former inhabitants. Fine, he was good for this kind of crap, but so were late-night reruns of _Gunsmoke_.

It figured that the last building they got to seemed to be it. Like all the others, it was basically pieces of lumber arranged around a vaguely rectangular shape, but Dean turned up a small, shapeless lump of silver when he kicked hard at the ground in one corner, and Luther managed to detect the remains of a kiln or whatever kind of fireplace a silversmith used from a pile of bricks and rocks against one wall. That done, they got the hell out of there, and didn’t say one damn thing about that to each other.

Once they were back in the car, Dean started up the engine. He was half-surprised when it didn’t give him any problems, like it would’ve in a Twilight Zone episode…but hell, this wasn’t a TV show.

“I don’t really like the idea of Sam doing anything out there,” Luther suddenly said. He glanced at Dean. “Are you actually going to let him?”

Dean put the car into drive and pulled away. He kept an eye on outside, not on the irritant sitting next to him, but no bogeymen popped out and no concrete reasons for his bad feeling appeared. Shame, because then he’d have had something to go on besides his goddamn gut feeling, and Sam wasn’t going to be convinced by that. For that matter, since Luther was having the same attack of nerves, Dean was tempted to ignore his feeling just because—yeah, he was being petty. Didn’t mean he could control it any better to know about it.

Luther let his head thump back against the headrest and sighed. “Look, can you forget for one second that you hate me and think about your brother?”

“Sorry to burst your bubble, but you’re not such a big deal to me that you’d ever come before Sam for any reason,” Dean snorted. He finished turning them around and aimed the car for the road. The rough ground was testing the shocks pretty badly, but nothing it couldn’t handle; he’d just have a sore ass when he got back to the hotel. “I didn’t like the idea before we even came here, but Sam says this is the only way we’re gonna get anywhere.”

“And you couldn’t convince him otherwise.” The disbelief in Luther’s tone was so heavy it should’ve made his damn jaw snap under the weight.

Dean wrapped his fingers tight around the wheel. The edge of the real road came into view, which offered a little bit of a distraction. “In case you haven’t noticed, Sam is a grown man with a mind of his own, and he’s very goddamn fond of proving that. He wants to do this, and nothing’s gonna get him to back off. And don’t even think about suggesting that we—”

“I’d have no idea how we could, anyway. He’s stronger than either of us.” Luther flicked his eyes over again, like he’d been expecting some kind of reaction from Dean.

Well, if he thought Dean was going to get all offended over that, then he was a moron. Actually, it was better the stronger Sammy was, since that meant he could handle more things without Dean having to worry; what Dean worried about was what made Sam that strong, and what prices they might have to pay for it. And he was pretty damn sure they hadn’t finished with that yet.

God, Dad, I miss you, Dean thought. 

His vision momentarily went blurry, then cleared just in time for him to swerve away from something small and furry crossing the road. Luther cursed and grabbed the handle above the door, but didn’t quite keep himself from sliding into Dean. But he yanked himself off before Dean had to push him, which was about the most sensible thing he’d done in weeks.

“Well, great,” Luther finally muttered. “If this is what Pawnee is like, then I can’t wait till we get to Lawrence.”

Dean stiffened for a second, but then he realized Luther still wouldn’t know anything about their personal connection to Lawrence; he was talking about that demon visit that might’ve happened about a hundred and change years ago. At least, Dean hoped so—he’d have to double-check with Sam on that one. “It’s not like we held a gun to your head and made you come along.”

“Yeah, I completely did this to myself,” Luther snorted. There was enough bitterness and self-hatred in his voice to make even Dean uncomfortable.

After a moment, Luther let out a short bark of a laugh and settled into the corner of his seat, staring out the window. Dean reached over to turn on the tape deck and the soothing shredded chords of Metallica instantly filled the air. This tape was fifty-seven minutes, which was long enough to get him back to the motel with about two minutes to spare. Which was good, since swapping tapes would’ve involved talking to Luther, and he was perfectly happy to avoid that.

* * *

Maybe they weren’t saying so, but neither Dean nor Luther wanted to do this. They made that pretty clear with how slow they were to finish the simple little tasks Sam had assigned them, like put four goddamn candles down on the ground, and with the grunt-answers and the constant glances towards the car. Fine, they thought it was a bad idea. That, Sam could deal with. What got on his nerves was their inability to say anything to him about it so he was stuck with their passive-aggressive bullshit.

“Okay, I think we’re done,” Sam said.

Dean flinched, then kicked at the ground with elaborate casualness. “Cool. Can we go eat now?”

“You had like, three pints of converted blood two hours ago.” Granted, the transmuted stuff wasn’t real filling compared to blood that’d been human to begin with, but three pints should’ve done Dean for a couple days.

“Well, _you_ need to eat, too,” Dean said. It was a pretty lame attempt to cover his ass, and he knew it, too.

Sam sat himself down and stared up at his brother. “I did eat. Remember? I mean, since every time I finished a piece of chicken, you were trying to stuff another leg in my hand.”

“Oh, right.” Dean gave Sam one of his charming my-fault smiles, which didn’t do a damn thing since Sam one, had a discernible IQ and two, wasn’t female. He kept poking around a rock with his foot. “Um—”

And he actually looked at Luther for help, who might not be any better about saying what was on his mind, but who at least clearly thought Dean was being an idiot.

“I think this is a bad idea. Something’s wrong with this place and I don’t know what, and I’d like to at least figure out what it is before we actually do anything. Of course, you don’t really trust me anyway, so it’s kind of pointless for me to bring it up, but there.” Well…okay, Luther did have balls. And was in one of his self-scathing moods, which tended to make Sam feel even more annoyed because he started feeling sorry for the son of a bitch.

“Look, I checked. This place is showing high levels of EMF, but it’s haunted so that makes sense. I’m not getting anything else,” Sam sighed. Honestly, they’d spent more time checking out this place than practically any other one he could remember. And besides, maybe vampires had super-senses, but he was supposed to be the magical freak, and the whole area felt completely tame to him. “Does it feel like the demon? Like any demon?”

Luther and Dean shared a look, which was an interesting development. Also a short-lived one, since the next moment, Dean had spun away and was walking over to Sam. “No,” he said. “But it’s definitely got a weird vibe.”

Sam flicked his hand out at their surroundings. “Haunted.”

“Not _that_.” Dean got down on one knee next to Sam, glancing nervously around. Something really did seem to be bugging him. “Just…do we have to do this now? What’s wrong with a couple more days of research?”

“You just…really don’t listen to me now, do you?” Sam snapped. “I told you—you wanted me to do this with Brown’s ghost as weak as possible. So we’re doing it at his store and not on his grave, and we’ve got to do it on a day when there hasn’t been a reported flashback experience here. Next week is the anniversary of Brown’s lynching, and after the anniversary of the town’s destruction, that’s when the most flashbacks have happened. Week after that, we’ll be in Lawrence.”

God, if it was such a big deal, then why hadn’t Dean brought it up earlier? Why wait till now, and with such a bullshit excuse? For all Sam knew, it was just Dean’s dislike of him doing anything magical cropping up again—actually, that probably was it.

“I do listen to you!” Dean hissed. “Why not do this after we get done in Lawrence?”

“Yeah, and when that happens, you’ll be why not do it in a month, and then—”

Dean threw up his hands, then jerked himself to his feet again. “All right, fine. _Fine._ Do the damn ritual.”

That…that surprised Sam for a moment; Dean usually didn’t give up that easily. He waited a moment, watching the other man angrily stalk around, but Dean didn’t come back for a second round. Sam didn’t have any idea how long a reprieve it was going to be, so he flipped open his notes and got started while he could.

The wind blew up, then abruptly ceased, and a thick, unnatural darkness clamped down around them. It was so black that when Sam glanced upwards, he couldn’t see the stars anymore. But that wasn’t an unusual occurrence for this spell, so he just kept on going. He could feel the power rising up, pushing and snaking around just underneath his skin, and in the background he vaguely registered Dean cursing, low and agitated. The different parts of the spell slowly aligned, clicked into place, and then…

…things _shifted_ …

* * *

One moment, Dean was standing up straight. The next it was like somebody was pressing the whole world against a glass pane, smearing it hard with a spatula or something. He couldn’t breathe—he struggled and tried to call for Sam—and then things were normal again.

Well, no, they weren’t. It was still dark, but vamp-sight let him see Luther flat against the far wall, and a shaken-looking Sam still down on the floor. It also showed him a roof, four whole walls and actual wood planking down on the ground. And he could hear people moving around—lots of people in the building next to them, which had at least three floors, and then somebody stumbling out on the street, and—and _horses_. He took a sharp breath and smelled sweat, booze, cheap cigarettes, leather.

“Oh…shit,” Sam whispered. “What the hell—”

“Shut up!” Luther hissed. He stared disbelievingly at Sam for a second—there was more than a little fear, too—then slowly turned around. A door had shown up next to him where there’d just been a big hole before, and he dropped down in front of it to…listen to what was going on in the beyond, apparently.

People were moving around there, with lots of light laughter and what Dean thought might be a piano. He glanced around again and saw shelves, piles of crates; he was standing next to a three-tall stack of big trunks, like the old-fashioned ones people used to use for luggage. After checking Luther, who was now picking at something in one of the piles, Dean eased his way into the center of the room where Sam was. He reached down and Sam immediately seized his wrist.

The place looked like a storeroom. A sinking feeling started in Dean’s gut and he suddenly wanted to throw open the door and run out to the Impala, but…

“Oh, my God.” Luther backed away from the door. A plank creaked under his foot and all three of them froze, but no one even started to come to check it out, so apparently it hadn’t been heard. Then Luther dropped to his hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way over. He held out a fragment of a paper; his eyes were fluorescing so brightly it was impossible to see his expression, but the green spots were so large that he was definitely in shock. “You smell that ink? This isn’t more than a few days old!” he whispered.

Sam took it, but from the way he let it dangle from his fingers, he couldn’t read it. Dean bent down to take a look.

It was a piece ripped from the front page of a newspaper: real funny-looking font…and then Dean saw the date. “Oh, _fuck_ \--wait, wait. This place is known for flashbacks. It’s one of those, right? We—we are _not_ actually in eighteen-fifty-five. We can’t be.”

“What?” Sam hissed.

Dean started to answer, then jerked around to stare at the door. Footsteps were coming their way, and maybe it wasn’t real, but—but he dragged himself and Sam over to a big heap of crates and hid anyway. He looked back, but Luther seemed frozen in place.

Sam elbowed hard at Dean’s side, then twisted free. He looked up and opened his mouth—

Luther gave himself a shake, then gestured sharply at them to stay down and shut up. He hurriedly yanked his coat around himself, then looked at his shoes: beaten-up work-boots. He winced for some reason and lifted one foot, but by then the door was opening and he whirled around to face whoever it was.

A woman let out a shocked little shriek, which made Dean tense up, but Luther jumped too, then made shushing motions with his hands. He took a huge breath—God, that was exaggerated—and said…something about the late hour and needing things and was he flirting?

“What happened to his accent?” Sam muttered. “What’s he saying?”

A thick, musky trace of perfume wormed its way into the room as the edge of a skirt swung into view. The woman stayed in the doorway so the door and Luther blocked most of her from view, but she sounded much more relaxed. She laughed, told Luther to just go on and help himself, it was all leftovers from broke bastards who’d gone running with only that to settle the bill, and the hell was she supposed to do with all of that cheap stuff when more and more were coming in with every stagecoach of hopeful fools?

Luther thanked her with a teasing, understanding kind of laugh. Both of them had weird accents, which weren’t the hardest ones to figure out that Dean had ever heard, but it did take some getting used to. The trickier part was getting all the slang they were using.

After some more back-and-forth—Luther and the woman seemed to be negotiating prices for something at one point—the door closed and Luther immediately slumped with obvious relief, putting one hand to his forehead. “Great. How long did those flashbacks last for everyone else?”

Sam hesitated, then pushed out from behind the boxes. “Only a couple minutes. They also said that it was like looking at a film playing—not very solid. And—and I don’t think this is one,” he said very quietly.

Luther glanced at him with no particular expression on his face. Then he shrugged and moved over to one of the shelves. He lifted out a box and pawed through its contents, then pulled out a bundle of clothing and tossed it over; Dean barely caught it in time. “Okay. That was the madam; she says help ourselves to the clothes and she’ll bill it to the room. She’s only got one free—also, I said you two were coming in tomorrow morning, and that was when we’d pay up.”

“The…‘madam’.” Dean flipped open the clothes he had, and after some squinting, figured out he had a shirt and…chaps? Oh, hell, no. “And pay? How the hell—do they take paper money back now—then—whatever the fuck. God, this is so fucked-up, even for us.”

“We’re in the backroom of a brothel. Not like any legitimate business was going to take over a haunted silversmith’s,” Luther muttered. He yanked out another box and picked a pair of boots out of it, then stuffed it back. He did that a couple times till he found a pair he liked. “Do you have any idea what faro is?”

He sounded stressed out, but otherwise he was doing that creepy calm routine of his, like…like getting stuck in a hundred and fifty years ago wasn’t a big deal. Like losing TV and air-con and cars without having any idea how to get back wasn’t a big fucking deal. Like things weren’t already bad enough because Dad was dead and Sam was in constant danger and Dean was a goddamn _vampire_ , and now they had to put up with _this_ shit, too? Holy fucking—

\--Luther snarled at Dean, way low so that he knew Sam wouldn’t have heard it. Maybe felt it, like the sudden crawly feeling you got when you knew something was stalking you, but he didn’t hear it. Dean did, and it jerked him right out of panic and into simmering rage; he slashed his arm out to keep Sam behind him and snarled back.

For some reason, Luther grinned at him. “Okay, that’s better. Could you save the hysterics for later?”

“What?” Dean blinked.

“Jesus, calm _down_ ,” Sam hissed, clamping onto Dean’s arm. He pulled at it, then pushed around Dean to go over to the shelves. “Fuck. Okay, this probably is the best idea. I still have my notes. We’ll just have to put up with this for a while so I can figure out how to reverse things.”

Dean…was not taking a while to catch on, thank you. He knew exactly what was going on, and yeah, that was practical, but it wasn’t necessarily something he liked. “Yeah…yeah, but brothel? What about our little hunger issues? And—and fuck! All I’ve got with me is my gun and a hunting knife. Our rifles—”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s not that goddamn hard to get rifles here. Though you’ll have to get accustomed to cartridge-loading instead of clips,” Luther muttered, hastily switching his shoes. He put his hand on a shelf and paused, then shook himself hard. “Jesus. Try to remember how to _talk_ …”

He seemed to be scolding himself right then, so Dean ignored it and started rummaging around for clothes. Fine, they’d ended up time-traveling and he wasn’t really equipped and he was mildly freaking out, but he damn well wasn’t letting Luther dress him.

* * *

Sam stared dubiously at the bed they were supposed to use. It was narrow and short enough so that he already knew his feet were going to be hanging off it, but more to the point, it smelled like semen and two insect-y things had already crawled out of it when he’d pulled back the sheets. Gross.

“I guess it was a good thing we dressed in the dark?” Dean weakly said. He yanked at his collar for the thousandth time in the last few minutes, then looked longingly at the bundle of their old, _modern_ clothes on the corner chair.

Actually, the clothes were probably okay. Nearly all of them had still been folded up nicely, so their original owners hadn’t even unpacked them yet, and Sam assumed—fine, hoped like hell—that most people only packed cleaned clothing. But the bed…Sam looked around, then gave up and sat down on the floor as far as he could get from the bed. “Well, I had a good nap earlier. I’ll just get started on getting us the hell out of here.”

“Yeah. God, Luther must be having a fucking ball. We really do need him for this crap, and God knows where he’ll go with that…” Dean dug his heel into the floor for a couple more seconds, then moved over to the window. “We can’t even leave, thanks to the story he fed that woman.”

“Look, he was covering for us there. It’s not like he had time to come up with some evil plan right then,” Sam had to say. There was a point to what Dean said, but there was also a point to the fact that Luther actually had saved their asses, and with no prompting.

A fraction before a knock on the door came, Dean turned around with a sigh. That told Sam who it was, so he didn’t bother to get up.

Luther eased himself around the door and inside as other people blundered down the hall past him, one a giggling female door and the other harsh and male and very, very drunk. He glanced back into the hall, expression an odd mix of nostalgia and disgust, then shut the door.

“How was faro or whatever?” Dean asked, voice dangerously nice.

“I remember how to play,” Luther dryly replied. He pulled a small leather bag out of his pocket and shook out the contents on the top of the dresser: a combination of unfamiliar-looking paper bills and heavy silver and gold coins. He rapidly divided it into four piles, then pointed at the largest. “That one is how much we owe to Jane, the…mistress of the house.”

Sam had pulled himself up to take a look. “Are you kidding? For this crappy room?”

“No, more for not gossiping about us, or even mentioning we’re around. I…” Luther frowned at the coins “…I…I’m trying to remember if anyone I pissed off would be in town. And where I was—am right now, for that matter. Also, I didn’t think you really wanted to spread the word since the demon’s pretty damn alive right now.”

“Oh…oh, hell.” Dean slumped against the side of the window, staring blankly into space. “We’ve got to get out of here.”


	2. Down-Home Week

In the end, nobody slept in the bed. Dean and Luther hauled it into the corner, and after Luther went down to get things settled with the madam, he came back up with a couple of thick, bug-free blankets that they spread out on the floor. “Jane sends her apologies about the bed. Business has been so good they can’t keep up.”

“Eighteen-fifty-five,” Sam muttered. He’d picked out a corner and planted himself in it, and he’d been hunched over his notes ever since, reading and rereading them. “Shit. What month is it? When is it going to end up the capitol?”

Luther blinked, then dug into his pockets. He came up with that piece of newspaper again and checked the date. His eyebrows rose. “It’s sometime in March.”

“March? It was late September back when we…back where we’re from,” Dean said. His shock was rapidly turning into irritation at everything from the damn flea-infested mattress to how the English language completely wasn’t equipped for time travel. Which just proved that that crap wasn’t right in the first place.

“They chose Pawnee in…May. The legislature didn’t move down till July. We’ve got time. Anyway, it’ll help since there’s so many new folks flooding in, building up the place,” Luther muttered, going over to the window. He prodded the frame a few times, then started working his way around the walls.

Dean watched him for a while, trying to figure out what the hell the guy was on about now, but finally just gave up. He glanced at Sam only to find his bro still in the corner, so he went over and started forcibly shifting Sam’s notes onto the blankets.

“Hey!” Sam made a grab for one, then was all pissed off when Dean slapped a hand over his mouth. He jerked away, then huffily got himself up and moved everything over. Then he started reorganizing.

Luther had jerked around at the noise, but since it was Sam, he let it go with just a glower and not one of his smart-ass comments. He went back to tapping at the walls.

“Folks? Jesus, do we really have to talk like that?” Dean asked. He yanked at his collar again as he watched Luther. “What are you looking for?”

“Well, you could just shut up. Probably save us a lot of other trouble that way, too. I’m checking to make sure the house is a straight one—sometimes they put in trap-doors so they can rob you when you’re sleeping. Or busy. Seems okay.” Done checking out the architecture, Luther swung back to the window and fidgeted with the sash for a couple seconds. He finally just jerked it open and stuck out his head.

At first Dean figured Luther was trying to smell for something, but then the crazy son of a bitch bent over, like he was going to hurl, and started to take long, slow breaths. Right about then, Dean realized Luther was trying to work himself through some kind of panic attack. That didn’t make him feel as smug as he really should’ve, given how much Luther’s unflappability got on his nerves.

Dean looked over his shoulder and saw Sam staring at Luther. Then Sam started to get up, but stopped when Dean waved him down. He raised an eyebrow. “What’s with him?”

“He’s just freaking. And he was on my case earlier,” Dean snorted, getting down on the floor. He flopped over in front of Sam so if his bro wanted to go poke at the vampire, he’d have to go over Dean first. “No, really, that’s all I’m smelling off him.”

“You sure? Doppelgangers usually aren’t a good thing, and yeah, this is time travel and not the same thing, but…” Sam gave Dean a funny irritated look, then went back to his notes. “Well, fine, if you’re going to be that way about it.”

He didn’t seem inclined to explain what the hell that had meant, and since Dean had a few guesses about it, he wasn’t real eager to get into another fight about it. He just laid down on his back and stared at the ceiling, trying not to listen to the three other couples having sex on their floor. One of them had two girls in there, and they had the shrillest damn voices—and somewhere on the ground floor, there was a woman who was having her period. Goddamn it.

“I feel like an idiot,” Sam suddenly muttered. He screwed up his face and angrily poked at his handful of sheets. “All right, come on. Say it. Tell me I should’ve listened to you about the place. Come on, Dean. You know you want to.”

Yeah, but not when Sam was asking for it with that kind of savage hurt in his voice. Dean rolled half-over, then stopped to pull at his damn collar again. The only real wardrobe choices had been fucking cowboy gear or scratchy bank teller suits, and since Dean wasn’t interested in a hoe-down…he’d gone with the suit.

So had Sam; the shirts and coat hadn’t been too bad, but they’d had a hell of a time finding pants that would fit him. Their own jeans had looked fine from where Dean was—didn’t Levi’s claim something about having dressed the Gold Rush or whatever?—but Luther had sworn up and down that the cut wouldn’t work. Too baggy, and baggy meant…stuff Dean hadn’t quite caught due to the way Luther’s accent had been randomly thickening and disappearing at that point. At any rate, that meant Sam had to dress like an undertaker—literally, since apparently the town’s last funeral director had been a six-six scarecrow.

“Okay,” Dean said, glancing up at him. “You look like a runaway from the Addams Family.”

For a moment, Sam stared. Then he shook his head and pushed at Dean’s shoulder with his free hand. A small, bitter half-smile briefly turned up his mouth. “Yeah, right.”

“Sammy, just—go to sleep, okay? We’ll get back.” Dean pulled the notes out of Sam’s hand and folded them up. He yanked up his elbow to block Sam’s grab for them, then rolled over so he could stuff them into his inside coat pocket before Sam could get at them.

Sam rolled his eyes and held out his hand. Which Dean looked curiously at while he rolled over on his belly, since he couldn’t exactly do anything with—well, one idea wormed itself into him, like a red-hot strand threaded through his gut, but he slammed it down before it got any farther. He anxiously checked Sam’s face, but it didn’t seem as if the other man had picked up on it.

“Dean.”

“Hmm?” Dean blinked innocently up at Sam.

After another second, Sam threw up his hand in exasperation. He roughly pushed his feet past Dean’s knees as he laid down, grumbling about idiot overprotective older brothers. Dust flew up and spangled in the dim light, then gently began to float down.

Some of it got thrown back up a few moments later, when Sam realized sleeping would be more comfortable without a tie on, and maybe without the coat, too. After he wrestled that off, he bundled it under his head; Dean wordlessly offered his own, which was a little too tight across the shoulders anyway. Then Sam got down again and turned so his back was to Dean: one last little spurt of annoyance. Goddamn brat sometimes.

Dean could still see the pale curve of Sam’s cheek, and then the dip of Sam’s neck. He leaned towards them, then pulled back when he realized he was going a little too far to just be checking on whether Sam really was sleeping. The blankets were pretty thick, but if he dug his nails down hard enough, he could feel the wood grain of the floor planks.

Naturally, when Dean looked over at the third in the room, Luther was watching them, half-wary and half-jealous. The window was still open behind him, letting in a stiff breeze and a hell of a stink. Luther glanced at it, then pushed down the sash and looked at Dean as if to say, ‘Happy now?’ Not likely. Then he looked at Sam, tilting his head.

“I’m not going to,” Dean snarled, real low beneath his breath. He knew Luther could still hear him and he didn’t want to disturb Sam, whose breathing was starting to slow into real slumber. “Don’t fucking look at me like that, like you’re any better.”

“When he wakes up, mind asking him to make up a list of the supplies he’d need for the blood spell?” Luther asked, all nice and calm. He latched the window, then padded silently across the room to the door. He honestly didn’t look too different from before, except for the boots and the wide-brimmed hat he had in one hand. “There are two other saloons in town. I’m going out to work on a bankroll.”

Dean moved so he could still meet Luther’s eyes, but kept himself curled close to Sam. “And some necks?”

“I can make do with steers if I have to. I’d worry about you with your finicky stomach,” Luther snorted. His eyes flicked over Sam again. “Should you be doing that?”

He put his hand on the doorknob, but just then somebody went by in the hall and they both froze. Then Luther opened the door, swinging himself around so anybody in the hall wouldn’t be able to see Sam and Dean’s feet.

It’d be one or two days before Dean got hungry enough for it to be a real problem, but even without the hard ache of an empty stomach, he was still feeling an urge to get closer to Sam. Low, insistent, but getting stronger all the time, and it was seriously starting to worry him. He hadn’t been sure whether it was a passing phase or not so he hadn’t mentioned it yet, but it was starting to sound like Luther had guessed. “Why don’t you just live off animals anyway?”

“They taste horrible. And if you want a decent drink—well, you’ve never tried to chase down a goddamn deer, have you?” Rhetorical question, apparently, since Luther walked out without waiting for an answer from Dean. He closed the door and locked it from the outside, which amused Dean a little. Then his footsteps thudded down the hall, paused—cute little girly giggle—and continued down the staircase.

Dean laid back down and put his arms under his head. He closed his eyes and tried to think about all the crap that’d be coming up—stuff they had to get, possible problems—but he couldn’t concentrate. When he opened his eyes, he found that he’d twisted around so he was facing the back of Sam’s neck, and at that point he said to hell with it and got up.

After getting a new seat across the room, Dean started trying to figure out if they could do anything about the demon while they were around. And what would happen in the future—in their real time—but still, there was—he jerked himself to his feet so hard that his heel thumped against the floor. Sam’s breath hitched and he moved around, but after a moment he settled down again. Dean dropped into the one chair of the room and took out his gun, then realized about all he could do was unload and reload, then shine it up with his shirt-tail.

He shrugged and pulled up his shirt. The damn tails were ridiculously long, hanging almost to his knees, so he might as well use them.

* * *

Sam woke up to the sound of the door-lock rattling. He glanced around and found Dean slumped in the chair, head thrown back and mouth wide open and well into the coma-stage of his day-sleeping. It’d be too hard to wake him up in time, so Sam twisted around to face the door. He’d just gotten his gun out when the door opened and barely shoved it beneath his coat in time.

A wide brown eye peered at him. Then a push sent the door open a few more inches and a woman was leaning into the room, smiling so he could see lots of creamy white teeth. Her front teeth were crooked and her nose was too long, but she was still very pretty…and her dress definitely wasn’t shy.

“Hello,” she cooed. “You one of the boys we were supposed to be expecting? My, did you ride in early. You didn’t even stop in the front to say hi to us lonely little prairie doves.”

Well…okay, they did actually say that kind of stuff. Weird. “Sorry,” Sam said. “We—”

“Aw, I forgive you already, you look so…sweet.” Something about the woman was off, niggling at the back of Sam’s mind even while he kept staring at her—he frowned and really tried to look away, only to find that he couldn’t. At the same time, the woman suddenly straightened up, her teasing mood quickly vanishing. “What the—”

She jerked around to glare at somebody, pulling her arms in; a big hand was wrapped around her left upper arm. She started to speak again, but the same person roughly pushed her out of view. “ _No_ ,” Luther said.

Sam had started to get up, but now he sat back down and watched. He still kept his fingers wrapped around his gun.

“Holy Mary taking a shit,” the woman snarled. She’d sounded pretty middle-class and like Sam or Dean before, but now her voice had deepened and she had a twang that could’ve slung an arrow a couple hundred yards. “Get your goddamn hands off me. You could’ve just said—”

“Then I’m sayin’, and thank you kindly, ma’am,” Luther sarcastically replied. He backed into the room, then spun on his heel to push the door shut. It looked like he’d rather have slammed it and only remembered they were trying to stay lowkey at the last moment.

Over in the chair, Dean abruptly twisted, then slowly sat up, blearily blinking around. Then he stiffened in the middle of a yawn; his mouth snapped shut and he jerked himself about just as Luther turned towards him. “What—”

“She’s gone off to bed now. But that fucking low-country whore’s gonna—” Luther cut himself off, putting one hand up on the door. He leaned forward, head down, then pushed himself back and shook his head. When he spoke again, his accent had gone back to vague. “Damn. I’d forgotten about that, too.”

Sam looked back and forth between the other two, then took a wild guess. “Vampires haven’t been hunted out of existence yet.”

“Nope. Shit. Like the state politics weren’t bad enough,” Luther growled to himself. “She’s about a year old, so her maker’ll still be around with the rest of his nest.”

Once it was clear things were cool, Dean had gone back to rubbing at his eyes. He struggled hard against his yawn, but could only manage to sluggishly cover his mouth. “So…fine…slasher party. Make me feel better, anyway.”

“Right up until we mess something up for later and we go home to the wrong present. Besides, vampires aren’t just around—they’re thick as locusts here with all the unrest. You start cutting and you’ll end up with a war, and we don’t exactly have the time for it.” Luther slid in front of the dresser and started pulling handfuls of something out of his pockets. When he dropped them on top of the dresser, it was to the accompaniment of clinks and clatters, so Sam assumed he’d been out hustling card games. “She smelled familiar. If I know her maker, then I can—”

“Uh, no? Do we look stupid?” Though Dean definitely looked half-asleep, despite the clear fury he was working up in himself. “I can so see where this is going. We get stuck in Wild West Kansas where everybody you know isn’t dead yet, so you think you can—”

“Pretty much everybody I know here is dead, too,” Luther snapped. After a moment, he took a long breath and put his hands on the dresser, pressing down till the wood creaked. “All right. Look. It’s eighteen-fifty-five. I’ve only been a vampire for about twenty years, and right before that, most of the people I knew as a human had all gotten themselves killed off going after the demon. When I say I might know the vampires around here, I mean I _will_ know them.”

That…was pretty confusing, and Sam wasn’t even living it. He briefly felt some sympathy for Luther. But that didn’t change the fact that the guy did have a history of following his own agenda, and of not telling them about it till after the fact. “So where are you right now?”

“California. I passed through Kansas on my way west in the twenties, and I didn’t get back to the place till next year.” Luther turned around in time for Sam and Dean to see him make a face at the weird way that sounded. His fingers pushed things around on the dresser; they shoved out a bunch of coins piled on paper bills at one point. “My land was in Oklahoma. I stayed there till a cousin could come out and take care of it and my sons, and then I started trying to find out what’d happened to Ivan.”

“The guy who had the Colt first—shit! I left that in the car!” Dean managed to get himself out of the chair on the energy of that panic attack, but it abandoned him soon after so he sat down hard on the floor. He put a hand to his mouth and bit at his knuckles, trying to stay awake.

Sam crawled over and pulled Dean’s wrist down. “Look, time-warps usually take you right back to the same day and time as when you left.”

“How much about time-warps do you really know about?” Dean snapped.

A lot less than Sam had been trying to make the other two think, but if he started freaking out, then they were going to be in real trouble. As it was, even when everything else was going right, Dean and Luther were still a pin-drop away from ripping at each other’s throats. “Besides, we can’t do anything about it now.”

Hopefully they’d take that as just him talking over Dean, trying to hammer the commonsense into Dean’s head. It looked like Dean might be too aggravated to pay attention right now—or at least to argue—but Luther wasn’t buying it. He wasn’t going to prod either, from the way he glanced away from Sam. “Anyway, back to my point. Ivan died somewhere in the Sierras. I got out there, and then it took me fifteen years to get back as far east as Kansas. You know why?”

“Can we all please cut the dramatics?” Sam sighed.

“Because there are enough vampires so that they’ve marked out territories, and they don’t like loners.” Luther cocked his head, looking thoughtful. “Actually, for that matter, we never did figure out if some of them were working with the demon…”

Great, like they needed more to worry about. Sam started to ask for more detail about that, but then noticed Dean trying not to slump to the floor. The tendons were literally popping in Dean’s neck from the effort, and that…that just wasn’t going to help.

“God, just lie down,” Sam said, reaching over again. The first time he tried to get Dean’s arm, the other man jerked away, but the second time Dean couldn’t even lift his head to look at Sam. “Come on. It’s not like you’re any good like this, so you might as well rest up.”

“Way to flatter me, Sammy.” But Dean fell over pretty easily, then didn’t put up any resistance when Sam started rearranging his arms and legs.

No, he actually was clever this time and waited till Sam brushed up against his hand. Then his fingers clamped down on Sam’s sleeve, and he wouldn’t let go till Sam finally leaned down. “What?”

“Don’t do anything before I wake up.” Dean’s grip momentarily loosened. Then it tightened, and he pulled Sam down with a surprisingly strong effort. “I mean it, Sammy.”

“We don’t exactly know enough for me to do anything anyway. I won’t. Really.” Sam twisted his arm around till his sleeve slipped loose. He began to push himself up, but Dean was still looking at him like an exasperated, pleading puppy—honestly, his so-called puppy-face was nothing in comparison—so Sam awkwardly squeezed Dean’s shoulder. “I swear.”

Dean stared up at him for a little longer, then finally closed his eyes. Barely a second later, he’d gone so slack that Sam could push a finger nearly an inch into his forearm and just watch the flesh give; the sound of his breath abruptly stopped, and the patch of blanket in front of his mouth and nose ceased fluttering.

“The lock’s not that great,” Luther said.

“I’ve still got chalk with me. I’ll just do a half-circle in front of that and the window.” Sam crawled backwards, then remembered his coat. He dug it out from behind Dean and shook it out. The wrinkles were pretty bad, but whatever; he swung it on, then turned around to see Luther giving him one of those looks. “What? At the least, we’re gonna need to hit the drugstore or whatever the equivalent is. I need stuff so I can make blood for Dean. Which we definitely can’t do in here.”

After a long moment, Luther turned away to make a wide circle around Sam. The top of the dresser was clear, but he’d picked up several small leather bags, one of which he dropped by Dean while Sam chalked a barrier spell across the door.

“We can’t stay here for much longer either. That girl’ll have her maker on us by tonight. There are a couple abandoned homesteads nearby that I heard about,” Luther said, tone carefully neutral. “It’s cloudy out, so I was planning to look at them anyway. You could give me a list and I could stop at the store on the way back.”

“And why are _you_ starting on me? I thought you would’ve been happy about not putting up with Dean?” Emotions could seriously screw up a spell, even when it was just a chalking like this and didn’t involve any speech, so Sam tried to keep his temper under control. But Jesus Christ, what made Luther think he had the fucking right—like he was their _father_ , and when his kind of interest had nothing to do with anything like that.

He flinched, which made a black, deeply-buried part of Sam feel a lot better. Then he shrugged it off and walked towards the window; the other little bags had gone into his pockets. “Everything else aside, Sam, you’re over six feet tall. You stand out.”

“You’re almost as tall as me,” Sam pointed out. Not to mention broader in the shoulders, and having that vampiric magnetism to boot.

“Yeah, but I have a really strong Texas accent. Everybody knows they breed ‘em big down thataway. You sound too Eastern.” Like he said, the accent could really come out when Luther wanted it to, apparently. He seemed to be getting a better handle on it. “You _look_ fresh, too. Like you just came in on the day coach.”

Sam finished the chalking, then crossed the window and squatted down next to Luther. He banged an elbow into Luther’s leg; after a second, Luther moved and Sam started on the second chalking. “Now who’s pushing it? Flirting the moment Dean’s out?”

A sharply-drawn breath right above Sam’s head. The boot by Sam briefly ground down its heel so the planking groaned, then slowly started to drag itself away. The chalking was only half-done, but Sam took the risk and grabbed Luther’s ankle without pausing in drawing. He heard a strange grinding noise, then realized it was Luther’s teeth. But by then, Sam had tranced a little, like he usually did when doing magic, and wasn’t really bothered by it. He just finished up the second spell. Then he let go of Luther and stood up.

The pupils of Luther’s eyes were spasming, flicking from pinpoints to black holes rimmed with the thinnest edge of green in no particular pattern. They tracked Sam on his way up, then stayed fixed on Sam’s face till he casually rubbed at his neck, and then they shot there. Luther sucked part of his lower lip into his mouth and bit hard into it—hard enough to make him wince.

“Dean’ll be okay here?” Sam asked.

“Should be. She doesn’t seem that stupid—she can’t be; she’s the only one working this house, so the madam’s not in on it. She’ll wait for her nest-mates to come help, and they won’t till sundown. In the meantime, he could probably take anything that came after him.” When Luther had flinched, he’d jerked his head sideways and now he had his eyes glued to the window. His drawl was thick as molasses now, but not nearly as smooth. It sounded more like somebody had gotten a good grip on his throat. “Except finding you gone.”

Sam rolled his eyes at the lame attempt. Usually Luther did a better guilt-trip than that. “Well, we’re gonna be back before then, right? I just need to buy things, and then you can go look at the farms. Hey, can you get a deer or something while you’re out there? I’m guessing it’d be hard to find a butcher’s that sells cow blood around here.”

“This is a shitty idea.” Each word came reluctantly from Luther. He turned his head farther away from Sam, eyes dropping to the sill.

He jerked when Sam touched his cheek. His eyes squeezed shut and his lips dropped open a little so Sam could hear the air popping as Luther tried to take a breath. Sam pulled his fingertip down Luther’s cheek to the middle of his throat, then lightly slashed it across before he pulled away. He didn’t like resorting to this—didn’t like how it felt, how his gut got all knotted up and the blood in his neck and jaw warmed—but if he had to, he had to. Dean was going to need the blood, and Sam wasn’t going to take a chance that Luther might sneak something into the spell that’d screw it up. There were already so many ways that something _Sam_ did would end up in poisoning Dean.

“I’m going. Either you come or you don’t, but I’m going,” Sam softly told Luther.

Who still wasn’t looking at him. After a moment, Luther swallowed so Sam could see the gorge in his throat fall and then slowly rise again. He turned stiffly around and leaned forward to open the window without scuffing the chalking on the floor. “You know, in the beginning I _liked_ you,” Luther muttered, sounding like he was talking more to himself.

“And what, you don’t now? That’ll make Dean feel better.” Sam pulled at his coat a few times, then decided there wasn’t any real way he could bundle it up and climb through the window at the same time. Once Luther was out, he just did the best he could and hoped he didn’t rip anything. At least the window opened out onto part of the roof so it wasn’t a sheer drop.

It was close, but Luther reached back and unhooked whatever Sam had snagged. Then he helped Sam the rest of the way through in an amazing display of limited contact, then closed the window. He did something with a knife and string that got the latch to shut. “I hope it does.”

That didn’t make any sense, but Luther was stalking over to the edge of the roof before Sam could ask. Sam just filed it for later, if they ever did have spare time for that kind of crap, and hurried after.

* * *

Even the backstreets were filled with a steady traffic of people despite the early hour, and Sam got enough blatant stares to make him feel like apologizing for Luther about ignoring him about that. But Pawnee was pretty small, so Sam just gritted his teeth and hunched over as best he could for the walk. That part actually wasn’t that hard, since it was damn cold and Sam’s suit wasn’t keeping out the wind very well. By the time they stepped into the ‘medecin store,’ he had his teeth clamped together to keep them from chattering.

The store had a roaring blaze in its fireplace, so it was amazingly warm. And it was amazingly well-stocked compared to a modern-day drug-mart—at least for what Sam needed. Convenient that they sold stuff like mercury powders over the counter.

He dealt with the whole accent thing by muttering to Luther, who stood at the counter and did the actual ordering. Sam poked around in each jar or paper twist before he okayed it. It got them more weird looks from the counter-guy.

“Planning on starting your own shop?” the druggist asked Luther. He added a little laugh to make it into a joke, but he wasn’t.

Luther snorted and shook his head. “Hell, no. I got my hands full enough with the business I already got—that’s arranging wagon trains. My cousin here’s a vet, just grad-yu-ated from Harvard. Got a lamed horse, he says he needs all this to fix it.”

The counter-guy visibly relaxed, and while he rang them up, he advised them on some remedy involving oil-paper and camphor. Luther nodded, smiled, drawled like he was getting paid for every inch further he stretched a vowel, and then stuffed their packages under his arm after he’d paid.

“Vet? Harvard? I don’t think Harvard ever had a vet school,” Sam muttered as they walked out.

“Believe me, they’ll never bother to find out.” Exit the drawl. The constant shifting between the two accents was really starting to get on Sam’s nerves; it seemed to bother Luther, too, since he kept giving himself a shake every time he did it. He led them around the side of the store and into an alley running parallel to the street, occasionally glancing up at the roofs. “Are you going back now?”

Something made the back of Sam’s neck prickle. He casually started checking out the roofs as well, then took a quick glance behind them. “Yeah, I think so…”

It wasn’t anybody or anything on the street, so Sam started looking at windows. Most of them were heavily curtained, but he caught enough fabric fluttering to be suspicious.

“Good.” Luther pulled his hat down to shade more of his face, then tugged his sleeves over his hands. He sniffed the air a few times, then grimaced. “You don’t object if I hurt _them_ , do you?”

“I thought you said that was a bad idea.” The sky was patched over with clouds, looking like a ragged quilt, and more heavy-bellied storm-heads were rapidly billowing up from the north. In a couple hours, it’d probably be as dark as late evening again.

“I said trying to kill them all would be a bad idea. How long before you can take us back?” Something fluttered up on one of the roofs and Luther slowly spun to look at it, then continued turning around till he was facing forward again. He cracked a couple knuckles, but kept on walking.

Sam hid his wince as best he could and pretended to think. In all honesty, he really wasn’t sure. It’d already gone on pretty long for just a common—well, the most common—kind of time-slip, so there had to be other factors involved. He hadn’t picked up anything before they’d started the spell, so most magic was out.

God, he missed his laptop. That and modern university libraries, and…damn it, they didn’t even have Dad’s notebook with them.

“I was meaning to ask you something about that—well, sort of. You said when you were—you’re going to be in Lawrence in a year, and it’s going to be ‘complicated.’ Like how?” They passed what looked like a couple houses hastily thrown up against the backs of pre-existing stores. Some of them had sagged away from the other buildings so there were narrow gaps in between them, and through one of them Sam glimpsed a strange pair of eyes, dark but glowing.

The glow was the reflection of a match-flame, which the man was using to light a cigar. He finished and raised his head while shaking out the match; his and Sam’s eyes briefly met. It was Richard Brown, the hanged silversmith.

“I don’t know. Yet. I think I’m probably going to find out in a couple days,” Luther was saying. “Sam?”

“Huh—yeah, okay, which means what?” Sam looked at Luther, then glanced back through the crack. Nothing. Plus something about Brown, something hazy about the edges of him, suggested an incorporeal form, so okay, they probably had a ghost. Maybe the spell had taken Sam too damn literally.

Luther didn’t answer for a couple of steps; Sam turned back to him, then lifted a hand towards Luther’s elbow. He shot a harsh, angry look at Sam and sharply twisted away so Sam missed. “Means I’m beginning to think that something we did here caught up with me there, only of course I couldn’t have known back then. You don’t have to do that.”

“Not if you keep playing nice.” They were back at the hotel. Sam could reach up and touch the gutter without having to even get up on his toes, but the crude curved strip of iron didn’t look like it’d been nailed down too tightly. He glanced around, but didn’t really see anything he could put his foot on. Nobody was around this spot right now, but it was too accessible for him to just lift himself up.

“Give me your foot,” Luther finally muttered, bending down. He hoisted Sam up onto the roof without even needing an extra breath, then backed off to dust himself down.

Sometimes it was hard to remember exactly what Luther was, when he was letting a fingertip on his cheek, or a couple of drops of blood smeared over his mouth, get to him so easily. But when he was fed, he probably could match Dean for strength and speed, and he definitely had more experience and knowledge on his side. He wasn’t tame by a long-shot; he still was a vampire, and he still had a vampire’s basic drives.

“You’d better be back before it even looks like sundown,” Sam said. He gingerly leaned back over the edge to look Luther in the eyes. “Dean needs to eat tonight.”

Luther shortly nodded. He started to say something, then thought better of it and slipped back into the alley, soaking into the shadows like he was one.

* * *

The house Luther was offering up as home base hadn’t been occupied in a couple months, as far as Dean could tell, but the bare essentials, like walls and roof, hadn’t started to break down yet. It was about motel-room-sized, which apparently was ‘large’ for the time period, and there was space in the back to shelter the two horses Luther had gotten out of nowhere. God knew why, since they didn’t seem to like either him or Dean much, and Sam sure as hell wouldn’t know what to do with them.

“You can train them to get used to it,” Luther said. “And no, I don’t think we’re going to be around that long, but at the very least you can jump on one and get it running if you have to. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the mood to jog everywhere.”

“Well, you’re touchy. Sleep-deprivation?” Dean actually felt pretty good in that department, despite a crick in his neck and a serious new hatred for perfume. The stuff the bordello girls used was raw, like it was meant more to take off layers of skin.

Luther snorted and nodded outside. “No, dealing with idiot yearlings. You still want a fight tonight?”

He wasn’t talking about horses anymore. The whole time they’d been in town, Dean had felt eyes on him, and he was pretty sure it hadn’t been due to how stupid he looked in his damn clothes. “What, you changed your mind? The head honcho swipe a meal from you or something?”

“I have no idea who he is. But I figure hanging around town and making a commotion’s as good as any way to flush him out, and you’re pretty good at that,” Luther sarcastically said. The skin over his jaw and the backs of his hands was a little reddened, but otherwise he didn’t seem any worse for spending the whole day out and about.

Which Dean hadn’t been happy about when he’d found out, but Sam was in a mood, too. Every time Dean tried to talk to him, even just about little details like “the water-pump still works, so I thought I’d get you a bucketful,” he just gave Dean a cold brush-off. He was currently holed up in the room they were calling a bedroom, sketching out pentagrams and stuff like that on the floor with the burned tip of a stick. And now Luther was being all weird, too. “Uh, thanks, but I think I’ll pass on the suicide mission. Anyway, aren’t we supposed to be getting a cow or whatever? You know, for eating purposes?”

“Then we still have to go back to town.” One of the horses skittered in its stall again, banging up against the side. Luther glanced at it, then moved downwind. He started picking at the flaking skin on the back of his right hand.

“When we passed at least one ranch on the way out?” Dean asked. He was trying to keep his head here till he figured out what had gone down while he’d been asleep, but God, was everybody making it difficult.

And if Luther gave him one more look like he was a goddamn moron, he was going to start a commotion right here. Fine, he didn’t know shit about freaking old-time Kansas—well, it wasn’t like he ever thought that would be a survival skill he’d need.

“Dean. They _hang_ people for stealing livestock,” Luther not-so-patiently informed him. “And when you don’t die? Then they’re going to try burning and staking and all the rest—it’s not that hard to convince people right now that superstitions are real.”

“ _Dracula_ hasn’t been written yet, has it?” If they were going into town, then they probably should get a move on. The sun was more or less down now.

Luther rolled his eyes and put his hand on the nearest stall door to swing it open. “One of the two barbers in town is central Europe something. I think he said Hungarian.”

They hadn’t even untacked the horses yet, since they’d just wanted to see if the stables would work; the stalls were on the small side. There was some scuffling and one sharp whinny, but after a second, Luther had the larger of the horses out and had managed to get himself in the saddle without any major mishaps. Though the thing kept shaking its head and stamping at the ground like it wanted him off it, and Dean could totally sympathize.

“Anyway, I already won a couple of steers last night. I’m supposed to come round and collect them,” Luther said.

“Well, thank you for finally bringing that up. And you wonder why we don’t like you.” Dean stared at the second horse. It was a guy, he guessed—it swung around and yeah, it definitely was male; no way that could be missed—and okay, saddle. Reins. It was totally glaring at him.

Luther coughed under his breath. His horse didn’t like him, but he looked ridiculously comfortable sitting on it; he wasn’t even doing anything with the reins, but seemed to just be using his knees and feet. “Need a hand?”

“Shut up, John Wayne,” Dean muttered. He took a deep breath, then pulled open the door and went into the stall. Hell, it wasn’t like the horse could kill him. He’d heal.

* * *

Long before they got to Pawnee’s main street, Dean was biting his lip to keep from groaning at how _sore_ he was. God. No wonder they’d invented cars.

“You still have grass in your hair,” Luther noted.

Dean started to reach up, but he felt his balance shift and instead made a grab for the saddle-horn. For no good reason, the damn horse suddenly started to turn left and he had to jerk up the reins, hoping to God that something would work. The horse snorted, did a little dance and then came to a complete stop. “The hell…”

Straight-faced, Luther reached over and grabbed the left rein. He pulled and the horse started up again.

“I hate you, and I hate horses, and I hate the nineteenth century,” Dean muttered. He gingerly lifted the reins again, trying not to let them move or anything so the horse wouldn’t stop again. “How much longer?”

“Right there,” Luther nodded.

The town was mostly ringed in with a complicated system of corrals and fences, some of which had horses and some of which had cows. Luther had pointed to one of the smaller side-enclosures, where a couple of guys that Dean could already smell were leaning against the fence. Once in a while, one of them would lean over to spit at the grass. If he had to take a rough guess, he would’ve said they hadn’t showered since maybe the day they’d been born.

“You just pull straight back to get the horse to stop. And when you’re getting off—”

Dean tried really hard not to make a face. Stopping he could probably handle, but getting off? And then getting back _on_ …he just knew that Luther had enjoyed watching that fifteen-minute debacle. “You know what? You go and you talk to them, and I’ll be on point and keep an eye on the road.”

The corners of Luther’s mouth twitched. He didn’t say anything, just shrugged like ‘your loss’ and touched his heels to his horse’s sides so it sped up. As he approached, the men at the fence lifted their heads and pushed back their long coats to show grimy pistols. One of them had a rifle, which made Dean’s hand ache for his own for a couple of seconds.

He let his horse meander for a couple more yards before he tentatively tugged at the reins. It slowed down, but didn’t stop till he gave the reins a harder jerk, and then it did so suddenly that his ass slid forward and painfully crushed his groin against the front of the saddle. Dean grabbed the saddle horn and bent over a little till he wasn’t biting his lip quite so hard, then sat back. Thankfully, the stupid animal didn’t move through all of that.

The clouds from earlier had hung around so it was a muddy-black sky, with only the moon occasionally making it through. It wasn’t all that warm either, to the point where Dean wished he’d gotten a long duster and something to block the wind from his ears, too. Mostly the breezes came in from the prairie, but sometimes they’d shift to come from the town and then he’d smell manure, sweat, sawdust. And blood: fresh and human.

Dean straightened up and looked around. After a couple seconds, a silhouette eeled out from behind a post and turned into a curvy, pretty girl with flaming-red hair. She had on a shawl over her shoulders, but that didn’t keep a generous amount of cream-white breast from showing. When she smiled, her teeth were just as pale. “Hello. You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“Just passing through,” Dean said, turning on the charm. He knew for sure when she didn’t blush and go all soft-eyed at his smile. He pricked up his ears, but Luther was still talking over by the other paddock, and it didn’t seem like anyone else was around. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“ _We_. Just how many are there with you?” Little miss vampire wasn’t bothering to seem hospitable anymore. “Look, there’s lots coming through since this place got put up for state capitol, but it still ain’t no free table. Who you with, anyway?”

Well…great. Dean didn’t even know how to bullshit anymore. “Uh—well—look, we brought our own supplies, so we aren’t going to leech off you.”

She snorted and came closer; the horse tossed its head and nervously backtracked a few steps so Dean had to catch himself on the saddle-horn again. “No, you’re gonna get us run out of town instead. Look, we got a good thing here, and I—”

“Hi.” Luther slowly came up from behind, accompanied by two cows. They seemed pretty cranky and stopped every few feet so he had to chivvy them along; Dean thought he saw Luther kicking at least one of them on the rump.

The girl snapped her mouth shut and backed up a little, which…kind of annoyed Dean, to be honest. Okay, he was shorter and he didn’t know how to ride a goddamn horse and he was dressed like a priss while Luther looked like the Black Hat Cowboy, but he knew he didn’t come off as some wimpy yearling.

“You twisted Annie’s arm around,” she sullenly said. She got up against the post, eyes flicking between Luther and Dean, and then suddenly fled to a passing group of horsemen on the main road. One of them pulled up short, leaned down to talk to her; she was all tossing her hair and laughing now. The others started giving Dean and Luther dirty looks.

“Well, that was real productive. Come morning, the funeral home’s going to be busy.”

“Like hell. There’s not enough people here for bunches of deaths like that to not be noticed. Those boys’ll be kinda pale for a while, but they’ll probably think it’s nothing more than too much womanizing.” The horsemen went on into town, one of them hiking the girl up in front of him in the saddle, and Luther watched them go with narrowed eyes. Then he booted the cows again, and they reluctantly got a move on. “Anyway, she was just trying to stall you.”

Dean stared at the reins in his hand for a moment, then up front, but Luther and the cows were already ahead. If he called for help…God, this was so annoying. He glanced around, then hunkered down and snarled, too low for human hearing.

Not too low for horse hearing; the damn thing screeched and leaped forward, and only some panicked yanking managed to get it under control. By then they’d ended up about fifty yards down the road, so Dean had to stop _again_ for Luther and the cows to catch up. Luther had his hand pressed really hard to his mouth for a while, though when he finally took it down, his face was completely devoid of emotion.

“You nudge ‘em with your heels to signal ‘start,’” he laconically said.

“Whatever.” Horses were _evil_.

It was maybe another ten minutes before they were moving along steadily enough for Dean to remember what their conversation had been about before, and that was just about when he started feeling eyes on him. The strength of the smell said four or five, and when he looked long enough, he could pick out where the grass wasn’t moving exactly in the same direction as the wind.

“You couldn’t win us a pair of rifles while you were at it?” he muttered out of the side of his mouth.

“You want to bring people running to see what’s going on? Besides, you know bullets wouldn’t slow them down enough. Break their necks.” Luther dropped the reins to adjust his shirt-cuffs, or something. Hell of a time for him to be getting an interest in fashion.

The cow nearest Dean abruptly stamped its feet into the ground and lowered its head, letting out a bizarre, moaning bellow. It refused to move no matter what Dean did, and then whatever was bothering it spread to the other one. Well, maybe the cows wouldn’t be such a problem after all. “Don’t I have to get down to do that?”

“You could just sit there and hold the horses if you’d be more comfortable that way,” Luther said. He suddenly tossed his reins over, then had swung out of the saddle and was down on the ground before Dean could object.

Luther’s horse abruptly started forward, so Dean had no choice but to snatch the reins out of the air and pull the damn thing back. He stayed leaning over, since now it smelled like the other vampires were coming from that direction. “What the hell’s your hurry? Anyway, breaking their neck isn’t going to kill them—”

The grass about three feet to Luther’s left suddenly erupted and a dark blur launched itself out of the middle. And it kept on going—Dean hastily ducked and glimpsed a face twisted with pain—to fall on the other side of the road. A sickening snap accompanied the thrashing rustle of the grass. The cows jerked up their heads and bellowed, the horses whinnied and skittered in a zillion directions at once, and Dean wondered what the fuck he was supposed to do if they started to run: Luther didn’t expect him to do any lassoing, did he?

Luther had plunged straight into the grass. It was about waist-high overall, but Dean guessed some wrestling was going on since all he could see was Luther’s coat flying up, and sometimes a sliver of Luther’s back. Then the nutcase crashed back out, breathing a bit hard and pulling yellowed blades out of his hair. He got back on his horse, shoved the cows’ asses a couple times with his foot, and then they were calmly going along again, as if nothing had ever happened.

Dean leaned as far over as he dared and peered at the side of the road. He spotted a boot, and then followed that up to the rest of the body. He couldn’t see the right side, but he could see enough of the head and neck to know that had been snapped, all right. It was a man, a pretty short guy with brown hair and blue eyes, and as Dean watched, one eye rolled to glower rage and agony at him.

They were vampires, but Dean still felt a little nauseated. “Okay…what the fuck was that? Your idea of letting off a little steam?”

“What, I can’t even kill other monsters now?” Whatever had been eating at Luther earlier had come back and brought a party. He held his elbows stiffly at his side and worked his jaw, and as if in sympathy, his horse was starting to stiff-leg it, dancing sideways whenever it got the chance. He turned them off the road and started pushing through the fields, which Dean guessed was some kind of attempt to throw off trackers.

Though honestly, that didn’t seem to be worth the effort. When Dean took a look behind them, the smashed-down grass in their wake wasn’t exactly hard to miss. “That wasn’t _killing_.”

“No.” Luther took a couple deep breaths. “No, that was warning them off. They’ll be able to get up in a couple of hours, but they won’t be able to do much but run home. Four of them, so that’s probably most of the nest. The _idea_ is, they’re too weak to risk coming after us for a few days, and by then we’ll be gone anyway.”

“And…that still wasn’t…what’s with you?” Dean asked. He glanced behind them again, hesitating, and then turned forward. Well, it wasn’t like going back to help the vamps was an option. They didn’t seem to get the hang of basic social rules like ‘do unto others’ and ‘don’t be a sadist,’ like Luther was proving right now. “By the way, I’d really, really appreciate it if you laid out your big plan _before_ you actually do it.”

“I’m not going to get you or your brother killed, so that should about cover everything you’re interested in,” Luther snapped. Then he swung out and dropped back behind the cows, keeping far enough away so that Dean would have to either raise his voice or figure out how to make a horse go backwards in order to keep up the conversation.

Since Dean didn’t feel like wasting enough effort for either option, he let it go. He just made a note to keep a little nearer to Sam tonight, just in case Luther decided to completely lose his mind.

* * *

Sam stared at the cow. It stared back with big, soft eyes that made him feel oddly ashamed of what they were about to do. “Okay, everything’s mixed up. Um…whenever you’re ready, I guess.”

They’d taken the other cow back to the farmhouse, but tied this one out here by looping a rope around its neck, and then another one around its horns and under its jaw. The second rope went through a iron stake bent into a ‘u’ that’d been driven into the ground, so when Dean hauled on it, the cow was forced to bend its head. Dean caught Sam’s eye and made a grossed-out face, then looked away as Luther walked up.

Luther had an odd-looking metal rod that was hollow and shaped into a sharp point at one end, which they’d dug up in the stable. He’d taken off his coat and thrown that aside, and now kind of sidled up to the cow. It jerked sideways and Dean grunted, digging his feet into the ground in order to hold it in place. He glanced back at the cow, then stared hard into its eyes; Sam felt a tingle on the side of his face that was nearest to Dean.

The cow settled into a stupor, so apparently the whole vampiric mesmerism thing worked on animals, too. Before it wore off, Luther put the sharp end of the rod against the cow’s neck and smacked it into the flesh with his hand; blood instantly began to spurt out of the other end and Sam had to rush to get the bowl under it in time. It didn’t even take a minute to fill that up.

“That’s plenty,” Sam said. He backed off while Luther did whatever the hell to get the bleeding to stop, then bent down to get the transmuting agent he’d just brewed up. Thirteen drops of that, one drop from his fingertip and the blood in the bowl turned black, then slowly red again.

Dean wandered over and whiffed at the blood, then nodded. He took the bowl and tipped it up for a loud slurp, which made Sam wince: being undead hadn’t changed Dean’s table manners any.

Sam turned around to ask how much Luther wanted, only to catch him licking blood from his fingers. He looked up a second later, then turned away, shaking the rod out onto the grass. “I’m fine,” he said in a short tone, bending down to untie the cow.

“He’s in a shit mood tonight,” Dean muttered. “Any idea why?”

He didn’t like not being the one doing the manipulating, Sam was tempted to say. “The other vampires?”

“Yeah, I guess. Sociopaths don’t flock together, huh…and what the…” Dean slowly backed off, but the cow just mooed and obligingly trotted after him. He stopped and it stopped, gazing deeply into his eyes. Took a step and it took a step. “Luther, what the fuck—”

“You did it too strong,” Luther commented, sounding amused. He stopped coiling up the rope to watch. “At least this’ll make it easy to get it back to the stable.”

“Ha ha,” Dean snorted. He drained off the rest of his blood, then turned around. Then he stopped, because the cow had plodded around to keep looking at him. He irritably dragged the back of his hand over his mouth and went off a few steps, then threw up his hands and stalked towards the house. “God, this better wear off.”

After collecting his things, Sam started to follow. He noted that Luther continued to keep about three yards in between them all the way back.

Once they were back, Luther made some excuse about the cow and went into the stable for another good half-hour before coming inside. By then Dean had told Sam all about the ambush, managing to go from revolted to knee-jerk warning Sam about Luther’s temper to reluctantly admiring in about two minutes. He’d finished up by flopping into one of the two pieces of furniture left in the place—a three-legged chair—and promptly falling on his ass on the floor.

“Anyway, I think it’s a bad idea for you and him to be out at the same time if you don’t know where he’s at,” Dean said, brushing off his pants.

Sam paused at that, then remembered he’d kind of implied that while he’d gone out when Dean was sleeping, he’d gone alone. “So I should follow him around?”

“No, of course not. I’d kind of like him to not go out at all, but that’s not realistic, unfortunately.” Still flipping his hands around, Dean started poking at the pot they’d set by the fireplace. The light from the flames played gently over him, giving him back his tan. “Hey, I think your dinner’s done.”

“Great.” They’d settled for some pretty dodgy meals, but getting stew out of a Western bordello’s kitchen had to be one of the shadiest.

Dean carried the pot over and they both looked inside. The stew was brownish and had half-recognizable lumps in it—carrots, potatos—and it smelled pretty good. But…spoon. Damn. There was no way Sam was eating with his hands, since for one thing, he’d burn himself. He patted himself down, then grinned as Dean presented himself with a spoon.

“Good thing _I_ remembered,” Dean said in a lofty tone. They shared a grin. But then Dean sobered again, clearly thinking about all their problems. “I’m just not sure what he’s up to here. Anyway, any luck with getting us back?”

“I’m thinking it has something to do with Brown. I wrote that spell to bring his ghost to us…well, maybe he got exorcised or something between his death and our time. So we might accidentally have come back so we could talk to him.” Sam gingerly tried a spoonful of the soup, then got himself another one with considerably more enthusiasm. It was _good_. “We talk to him, the spell’s purpose is fulfilled, and we go back.”

Surprisingly enough, Dean didn’t look too happy. “So…we have to go back into town and get into his old store or find his grave. That’s not going to make the other vampires, whoever they are, all that happy.”

“Yeah, since Luther went all berserker on them. I’ll tell him to knock it off,” Sam said.

Long, uncomfortable pause from Dean. When Sam looked up, Dean only met his eyes for a moment before glancing away, rubbing nervously at the side of his nose. “Be careful with that, okay?”

“Believe me, I am. I’m nothing but careful,” Sam replied. He looked back at the soup. “This isn’t too bad, actually. At least I’m not going to starve.”


	3. Exhuming the Past

When Dean was on the converted blood, he tended to start getting sleepy sooner in the day. He’d been on that for a few weeks now—he’d gotten torn up badly by a water serpent in Minnesota and he’d had to take so much from Sam then that Sam was still recovering from it—and in addition, something about the time dislocation itself seemed to be getting to him. The barest hint of dawn had touched the sky when he started stumbling and slurring his words, and by the time the top of the sun crested the horizon, he’d completely collapsed in one corner of the bedroom.

Sam tucked the blankets firmly around him, double-checked the wards he’d half-chalked, half-carved into the window-sills and door-frames, and then he went to go find Luther. That was a little harder than it really needed to be, thanks to the bastard sneaking out while Sam and Dean had been having a discussion about how to trap Brown’s ghost.

The morning was _freezing_. As soon as Sam stepped out onto the back porch, the wind blistered right up into his face and nearly chased him back inside. It cut right through his clothes so he could barely concentrate on anything but keeping his teeth from chattering till they snapped off. It…just made him more pissed off, to be honest.

He stalked around the back end of the house and into the stables. Like he’d guessed, Luther was leaning over a half-open stall door, softly talking to something, but he stopped the moment Sam walked in—damn it, if Sam had been a little quieter, he wouldn’t have been noticed at all. He’d been upwind, after all.

“Private meeting?” Sam asked, careful with intonation and tone.

“What, with a horse?” Luther answered, just as carefully. He backed off from the stall and turned so he was facing Sam head-on. “Don’t you need to sleep?”

He and Dean had come back from town more than a little scuffed up, but somewhere along the line, he’d gotten cleaned up. God knew how, since the whole time he’d been in the house, Dean had stalked around following his every move, and the water straight from the pump was too cold to do anything with: it numbed the fingers in less than a second.

Well, okay, Luther was undead and that wouldn’t bother him the same way, but he pulled his coat closer against a stray draft the same way Sam did. Speaking of that…Sam hooked the door with his foot and tried to pull it shut, but the force of the wind worked against him. He got it closed in the end, but only after giving it a good yank that sent the horses into an ear-piercing fit for a while.

“Cold?”

“You’re incredibly smart sometimes, you know,” Sam snapped, rubbing his hands together. He moved further into the barn and was suddenly enveloped in a thick, comfy warmth that almost made him sigh in relief. It kind of smelled in here, but damn, did big animals like cows throw off a lot of heat. “I had a nap while you and Dean went and fucked with the local vamps. What the hell’s your problem? You can’t just fight with Dean, and now you’ve got to start a pissing contest with everyone else in the neighborhood? What happened to playing it low-key?”

Luther stared hard at Sam for a second, like he seriously couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Then he just shook his head and ducked around the corner to start messing with something on the far wall. “You can’t be this naïve. You know what you’re doing.”

Actually, not really, not most of the time—not since Dad had _killed himself_ \--and every single second of every day, Sam was achingly aware of that fact. It lurked at his feet with every step and scuttled his dreams and constricted his breath. And Luther, of all people, was accusing Sam of having some twisted second agenda?

“Since you weren’t around long enough to hear Dean and me talk about it,” he started to say, walking towards Luther, “I think that Brown’s ghost—”

“I’m a vampire. Sam. I could hear you two talk it over from the next room.” Each word was expelled on the tail-end of a sharp grunt. Whatever Luther was doing involved pulling hard and repeatedly at something about waist-height on the wall, which was accompanied by jerky tearing sounds.

Sam shut his mouth and stopped where he was, right in front of one of the horses. It let out a nervous little huff and cornered itself in the back of the stall, and when he glanced over to see what was going on, it jerked its head towards the wall. But not before he’d seen the whites of its eyes roll at him, and goddamn it, he was _not_ a monst—he took a deep breath and rounded the corner. “Well, great. I don’t have to go over it again. And I’d like to think that I don’t have to explain why it’d be a bad idea to make it hard to go back to town, since the only way we’re getting home is by doing that.”

“It’s a very nice plan, Sam,” Luther muttered. It turned out that he was ripping apart some kind of harness, strip by strip. A buckle dropped to the floor and bounced off his foot while he was answering. “I’m happy knowing you still think you can explain away everything.”

The fucking son of a _bitch_. “And what the _fuck_ is that—”

The pain rose, crested and seemed to stab its way out of Sam before he even realized what he was doing; Luther was snatched sideways and slammed up against the far wall, high enough so that his head banged the ceiling and his feet went off the ground. Then he went crashing to the dirt as shock and righteous satisfaction and ice-cold terror fought it out for the honor of being Sam’s reaction.

The terror won. Unsurprisingly, but that didn’t keep Sam from starting to shake. His hands and head felt like they’d been plunged in the freezing, slightly rot-smelling pump-water; the thoughts in his head were slow and leaden and unrelieved black.

He wrapped his arms around himself, but only shook harder. In the end, he had to lean against a nearby post for support.

Luther stayed down for a long, long moment. Then he slowly put out a hand and rolled himself off his stomach and up against the wall. He looked past Sam and straight into the empty stall across the aisle from him—Sam suddenly heard the horses and cows going completely ballistic, ramming into the walls and shrieking, though they had to be doing that for a while. He glanced over his shoulder, but no Dean came storming out.

“God, he can sleep deep. Lucky bastard,” Luther said under a pained breath. When Sam turned back to him, he had a hand inside his coat and was gingerly pressing around, his jaw going from clenched to steel-rigid every so often. He stopped when he got to his shoulder. “Look, vampires don’t like each other unless they’re blood-related—you know which way I mean that. I do have a damn hard time with Dean, and he’s your brother. With the others—actually, we don’t stand out as much if instead of hiding, we’re…”

Thinking about Dean was about the only thing that got Sam to focus nowadays. He shouldered himself off the post and took a few steps forward, then bent down to reach for Luther. His hand was still trembling pretty badly, so it wasn’t like he could’ve really done anything, but Luther jerked back anyway. Doing that obviously hurt his shoulder, but he kept pressing himself into the wall the closer Sam got.

“None of them are that strong, so I don’t think their leader has many years on them either,” Luther added, voice flat and low and running fast. He sounded increasingly rattled, and this was after he’d gotten thrown into a wall.

Sam pulled back his hand and squatted down in front of Luther. He needed a second to hike up his sleeves—his coat had been made for a bulkier guy and flapped a bit on him—then grabbed the side of Luther’s coat and pulled it out of the way. Luther hissed and hitched himself up the wall; he put out one hand like he was going to shove Sam away, but pulled it back as if it’d caught fire. “If your shoulder’s dislocated, you can’t put it in yourself,” Sam said.

“ _This_ is what’s bothering me.” Since Sam still was holding onto his coat, it wasn’t like Luther could go anywhere, but he was still thinking about it. He jerked his head sideways, and even started to move in that direction; he made the mistake of trying to slide his right knee between them. When Sam grabbed it and pushed it back, Luther threw up his head to stare half-wildly and half-fearfully at him. “Don’t—”

“Use you?” Sam said, just as harshly as the idea actually was. He shoved aside the arm Luther started to raise between them, then slid his hands inside Luther’s coat. It was a dislocated shoulder, and a little focus had it popped back into place. Yeah, stuff like this was a lot easier when you were a telekinetic freak. “Sorry, but if I have to, I have to.”

Luther spat out a curse when the bone snapped back into place, arching up so Sam could smell the blood on his breath. Then he fell back, shaking his head. “You aren’t, you know. If you really wanted to just use me, you’d have done that and have trashed me by now.” He saw that Sam didn’t believe him and pushed himself up the wall so he and Sam were level with each other. “You’d just torch me till I told you, or figure out how to crack open my mind.”

“You’d actually want me to do that instead? Come on.” Sam still had his palm lying over the front of Luther’s shoulder. He pushed it up till his fingertips climbed over Luther’s collar and were touching the bare skin of Luther’s throat. Like usual, Luther’s pupils dilated and he went stiff.

He softened up when Sam slid his hand higher, cupping his jaw and lifting it so Sam could use his other hand to scratch a thumbnail over the veins in Luther’s throat. It’d been too long since Luther’s last good meal for him to have a pulse; Sam pushed down on the spot where that would’ve been and Luther groaned, eyelashes fluttering down. 

He’d always shut up at this point before, but just when Sam was beginning to think he was done here, Luther’s eyes abruptly snapped back open. Then his face twisted in what looked a lot like disgust and he tried to pull away, flailing with his hand. His nails came too close and Sam momentarily panicked, dropping his hand to squeeze Luther’s throat. Then he realized what he’d been doing and snatched his arm back, balling up his fist against his chest. “Shit. I didn’t—”

“You’re apologizing for the wrong damn thing,” Luther snapped. He stayed hunched up against the wall for another moment, then warily relaxed. “You hate monsters. You’re supposed to throw them into walls. But now you’re getting confused, and when you get that messed up, you can’t kill anything because you won’t be sure.”

“Well, excuse me if I’m not going to throw Dean into a fucking wall,” Sam flung back. He rocked forward again, almost ready to slug the fucking—the planks behind Luther clattered and they both froze.

After a second, Luther glanced behind himself. “I’m not Dean.”

“Thanks for letting me know.” Sam sat back on his heels and stared at Luther, and when Luther got done with looking at the wall, he turned around to stare back. The whole fucked-up thing went on for a while so Sam’s thoughts could twist themselves into knots so convoluted that they suddenly untied themselves, and then he had to pay attention to them. Which he didn’t want to do, given their conclusions. “Look, I can’t be a psychopath. You know, aside from the fact that I am _not_ one—I’m fucking not, and to hell with everybody that wants to make me one—the moment I—”

“I’m not saying you have to be a psychopath. But every time you start working on me like that, like you think I’m human—”

“Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to convince us to believe for months?”

Luther sat there and looked at Sam while his expression went from startled to self-condemning to slightly hysterical black humor. He finally just shrugged. “Sam, two hundred years ago I was a human. Right now I’m a vampire, I’ve been a vampire so long it’s actually giving me some kind of nervous breakdown to get reminded of me as a human being, and—and I _kill_ people. Jesus Christ…” he briefly pressed his hand to the side of his face “…this is why I never made anybody a vampire who could argue back with me.”

Well, wasn’t that information overload. It took maybe a minute for Sam to even begin figuring out what Luther was saying, and then of course things were so complicated his mind went for the easy part. “But…Kate?”

“Kate.” A sad, wistful smile flitted over Luther’s face. “I loved her, all right, but she damn well wasn’t the brains of the group.” Then he grimaced and looked away. “She did get me into this mess, going after Elkins like that.”

If Luther’s point was that vampires weren’t human, but were _like_ them, then little moments like that did a lousy job of making it for him. Whether or not only the idea that only people could have real, true emotions was true didn’t matter, because people were the only standard of comparison Sam had. He’d always refused to see Dean as anything but ‘human,’ and now Luther was starting to read the same way to him. “But so what? Demons don’t feel like people—a demon would never kill itself over something its kids did. It’d _kill_ its kids. As long as I don’t get to be like that, I’m safe.”

Luther’s eyes came back to Sam, flicking sharply up and down. He straightened up, disagreement stormily clear in his face. “Demons go for your weaknesses. Yeah, they’re inhuman, but they get to you because you’re human.”

“Well, then there’s no fucking way I can win, is there? Either way, I end up on their side, so I could do whatever—” Sam reached over and grabbed Luther’s hurt shoulder, squeezing hard enough to strain the sore socket. The moment he got a wince, he immediately loosened up and bent forward so their noses were just touching, whispering his last couple words “—and it doesn’t fucking matter. I could _fuck_ you and it’ll all end up the same way.”

“Sam—”

“It just doesn’t matter,” Sam repeated. He sensed something come up and reach for his neck and intercepted it, pinning Luther’s wrist back against the wall as he leaned down. He smashed his mouth to Luther’s, then pulled back. “Doesn’t matter.”

Sam pressed his lips to Luther’s again, and this time he held them there. It was kind of like a dare with himself, the way little kids dared each other to hold their breath underwater. Or to do shit like pretend their most-loved lunchbox didn’t matter and lend it away for something and never get it back because it’d been used to choke a fucking werewolf or something. It was all stupid, but at least it did something with all that fucking energy or whatever it was that made Sam explode things and set them on fire.

Luther slammed at Sam’s shoulders a few times with his free hand, but his mouth was trying to give way. It opened up even while he was trying to shout protests into Sam’s tongue, and then he nicked Sam’s lower lip and that was it for him. Vampire, right. Vampiric and hopeless no matter what he said, his fingers now digging into Sam’s upper arm and his mouth warmly welcoming Sam’s tongue as he latched onto the little nick he’d made, and didn’t that make him a good match, after all. He started to sink down the wall; Sam was shoving him harder and harder and the pressure couldn’t go out, so it went down.

He pushed his hand off of Luther’s throat for a moment and snagged it on Luther’s ponytail, which momentarily frustrated Sam till a chance jerk while he was trying to free his fingers sent Luther’s head sideways, his throat arched towards Sam. And a mouth on the pulse-spot got an even stronger reaction than a fingertip; Luther stopped trying to pull free and instead twisted his fingers so they wrapped as best they could around the hand Sam was using to grind them into the dirt. He groaned and twisted further around so more of his throat was pressed into Sam’s mouth, forcing Sam’s teeth into the flesh till they were just about to break—

 _Bang_.

Sam jerked up, then around, and so fast he nearly tumbled himself over Luther in his hurry. At first he’d thought it was a gunshot, but he didn’t see, hear or feel anyone around. He got up on one knee and looked around again, and that was when he realized all the animals had gone silent.

A quick step into the aisle showed that they were still around, and alive. It also revealed that the stable door had somehow been thrown open, and now was rattling in the wind. A chill briefly went through Sam, but…no, Dean would’ve gotten in there and yanked them apart. He wouldn’t have stormed off.

Nothing was particularly pinging, so in the end, Sam figured it’d been the wind. The door had been seriously warped by neglect and had to be jammed in place, then tied down. And Sam hadn’t done the second part when he’d come in.

He heard a sound behind him and turned to see Luther staggering to his face, wide-eyed and breathing hard, with one hand clapped to his neck. After a long moment, Luther’s expression hardened. “Don’t _ever_ goddamn bite me again,” he snarled. His anger was barely a veneer and cracked before he’d even gotten to the curse-word to show a deep, deep terror. “Ever.”

He swayed in place, waiting for a reaction. When Sam didn’t give him one, Luther whirled around and walked so fast outside that he was practically running.

Sam’s hands started to shake despite how warm the barn was. He shoved them under his arms, then forced his way through the blustering wind to the pump, where he scrubbed his face and mouth and hands till they felt raw. Then he went inside.

Dean was still sleeping, and from the looks of it, he could keep doing it till the world ended. Which might be something they could test soon, Sam grimly thought.

* * *

Some days, the whole daytime coma issue was almost worst than the blood issue, or the wanting Sam in not-kosher ways issue, and this was one of them. The first thing Dean had heard when he’d woken up was Luther saying “Well, yeah, every time that happens, I end up trying to piss off your brother. What else can I do?” and that was definitely not music to his ears.

And when he’d asked for an explanation, he’d gotten the stonewall. From Luther, that was a little weird, since the prick usually liked sarcastic explanations that made him look superior, but from Sam? He and his brother were having a long goddamn talk the moment they got some privacy.

Also, Dean still hated horses. And they reciprocated.

“It’s a really long walk back to Pawnee,” Sam said, all long-suffering and completely fixating on the most trivial part of what Dean had just said. He wasn’t looking all that comfortable in the saddle either, but he at least had telekinesis so he had managed to get up there without being thrown on his ass a half-dozen times. “And it’s really fucking cold.”

His cheeks and ears did look a bit raw and red, which didn’t dispose Dean towards Luther any better. That jerk had made them ditch their jackets since those were too modern-looking, but he’d kept his own long coat. “Make Luther buy you a new coat once we get there. Besides, we seem to be going pretty well right now.”

“That’s because we’re trying to match your walking speed. You’re really slow.” Sam shifted around, wincing and trying to get his ass off the saddle for a second. But standing in the stirrups took a lot more effort than it looked like, so he only managed it for about a minute before he settled back. He bounced when he came down and the horse started to go sideways so Dean had to push at its shoulder to get it going back the way it was supposed to.

They were off the road and cutting through the fields, since they had to be paranoid about the local vamps now. The grass was basically an endless sea of dead brown stalks that rasped against Dean’s calves and stabbed through his clothes and pretty much tried to give him the death of a thousand cuts every time he moved. All in all, he thought he was moving at a good pace. “Look, I’m practically being eaten by the prairie down here, but I can still see the town. Ten minutes, man.”

“I thought you wanted to go home,” Sam tersely said. He didn’t quite flick a glance towards the third one of their group.

Luther usually tried edging up on Sam, but right now he actually seemed to be trying to put as much distance between them as possible. He was riding on the other side of Dean, and his horse periodically lunged forward so he was a little ahead of them. He was still in hearing distance, but Dean decided he didn’t care.

“What’s up with you two? Did he try anything while I was asleep?” he asked, waving at Luther’s back.

Oddly enough, Sam’s face did that frozen thing that he usually saved for when he was feeling guilty about something Dean didn’t know about. Then he went blank. “No. Just the usual crap.”

“Okay…that’s _bull_ shit if I ever heard it. What happened? Can I kill him yet?” Dean’s heel came down on dirt that suddenly gave way into some kind of hole and he stumbled. His hand caught Sam’s foot and he grabbed on, using that to pull himself back up.

Sam jerked in surprise and nearly kicked Dean before he figured out what had happened, and by then the horse had decided it was a great time for it to try and stamp on Dean. He scrambled to get out of the way, then whipped around because he was worried about Sam.

So far Sam seemed to be okay, but the horse was getting increasingly nasty about trying to throw him off, and Dean wasn’t that sure that Sam would be able to save himself in time. He started forward, but the horse quickly backed up, throwing its head around so something thin and brown flew violently around its neck: reins.

Okay. Jumping and grabbing stuff out of the air with great timing definitely was something Dean could do. As soon as he got hold of the reins, he yanked down so the horse either had to knock it off, or risk getting one hell of a wrenched neck. The horse knocked off the hysterics.

“Good choice,” Dean muttered, easing up to it. He stopped when it snorted and jerked away its head, then started again once it’d calmed a bit. “Sam? You okay?”

“Yeah—what’s going on?” Sam raised his voice and looked past Dean.

When Dean turned around, he saw that Luther had been ignoring the whole proceedings to watch something going on in town. Dean was too low to see himself, and the wind wasn’t blowing the right way for him to get any ideas about current events from the smell.

Luckily for him, Luther answered fast. “I think it’s a lynching party.”

“ _What_? Jesus Christ, we have to—”

“No, not for us,” Luther snarled. God, like it was that illogical a jump for Dean to make. “They’ve already got whoever it is. They’re dragging him to a tree right—dragged. Never mind.”

“Jesus,” Sam said beneath his breath. He looked a bit sick when Dean checked on him. “How much of a chance that he did anything to deserve it?”

Luther looked sharply at him. “You’re not thinking of interrupting, are you?”

Sam dropped his eyes to his hands and swallowed hard, which meant yeah. And as revolted as Dean was himself, he had to tighten his grip on the reins. “Come on. Let’s deal with Brown.”

“Not part of _our_ business, huh,” Sam muttered. “Whatever that is now.”

“I think he’s dead anyway. Whoever hanged him did a decent job—snapped his neck instead of leaving him to strangle.” If Luther was trying to make them feel better, he was doing a lousy job. And that probably wasn’t his aim, since he met Dean’s look with a casual shrug. “What? That’s mercy for you out here.”

Dean didn’t bother to dignify that with an answer. He started forward, then glanced over his shoulder at Sam when the horse didn’t move.

Sam was just turning around; he bonked his feet against the horse’s sides and it began moving forward with a snort. He’d been looking at Luther, and Luther had been carefully staring away, and it all just said ‘bad issues’ to Dean.

Ten minutes till they could stop.

* * *

It seemed like half the town was massed onto the main street, either in anxious, excitable groups or glowering from the porches with firearms prominently displayed. The lynching party was coming back in town, but slowly like they were on goddamn parade…which made the bitter taste in Sam’s mouth even stronger.

Well, everyone out there at least meant there was no one to notice them coming up the backside of the brothel. Lanterns and torches were blazing all over the place so Sam had no problem seeing his way around.

Luther stayed on his horse and hung back, apparently uninterested in watching Sam fumble around for five minutes before figuring out how to get off the damn horse. He kept heeling his horse around to stare behind them, and he glanced often at the rooftops, too.

“I don’t smell any vamps around,” Dean suddenly said. He arched his eyebrow at Sam, then nodded towards what was left of Brown’s silversmith shop, now the brothel’s storage room. “Come on. Whatever the hell’s bothering him, he can deal with it himself. Let’s go get Brown.”

Sam hesitated, and not because he was worried about Luther. He had a feeling that the moment they got into an enclosed space, Dean was going to jump on him, and they so didn’t have time for that right now. On the other hand, if Dean ever had had a good reason to jump on him, then this was probably it.

Dean glanced at him again, then stalked up to the back of the old silversmith’s shop. A door had used to be in that wall, and the cracks where it’d been hung were still visible, but it’d been planked up a while ago. So had the windows, but they looked slightly less formidable, so Dean naturally went for them. He poked around the edges before finding a loose plank and yanking on it.

The wood groaned, then suddenly cracked pretty damn loudly. Wincing, Dean whipped around; Luther glanced over, but then went right back to having his fit. Though at least he was quiet about it.

“Jesus,” Sam muttered, finally coming over. He left the second horse tied up to the side of the main house. “Could you be any more obvious?”

“Yeah, yeah, nobody’s coming, let’s go.” Dean dealt with the other two boards nailed over the window much more quickly and quietly, then hiked himself up on the sill and wriggled through, mumbling the whole way about how he wished he had his rifle. He landed inside with a soft thunk and did some rustling around before he reached back for Sam.

Squeezing through the window almost made it seem like just another job, but any chance of Sam using that to get through things was crushed when he knocked over a box on his way in. Luckily, it didn’t hit the ground, but it did tip out a few metal things that Dean just caught in time. He made a face at Sam that was way more about ‘stop criticizing me, _see_?’ than ‘be careful,’ then held up one of the tools. Which was clearly a pair of tongs with a crucible fixed to one end, and Brown clearly was giving them more trouble than any other ghost they’d ever had to handle.

Sam gave himself a shake and stood back to check out the space: more cramped than he remembered. Damn. “We need to move some of the boxes,” he whispered.

Dean had already blocked the door to the house. “Dude, there’s no room. Unless we put them outside.”

“Gee, I wonder how long it’ll take people to notice that. There’s no way the lynching is going to keep them occupied for that long, and I’m pretty sure this place does its best business at night.” They’d need space for the casting circle, and on top of that, enough room to make sure that Brown’s spirit couldn’t get too close to them. There had to be some way to do it.

And after Sam had prodded his way completely around the room, he had to conclude that Dean’s suggestion was the only one that’d work. He ignored Dean’s little told-you-so moment and went back over to the window to get Luther over. But halfway there, something thumped down on the roof.

Sam froze, staring up at the spot like he’d actually be able to see through the ceiling. After a long, tense second, he sensed Dean moving around; he didn’t hear Dean at all. His brother soundlessly slinked by him, all the irritation and nerves subsumed into pure focus, and smoothly bent down to scoop up something from the floor. When he passed through the little bit of light that was coming in through the window, Sam glimpsed a long, thin piece of metal. Some other old tool of Brown’s, maybe—apparently the…mistress or whatever never threw anything away.

Everything had gone relatively quiet—Sam could still hear noise from Main Street out front, but that was it—except for a low, uneven shuffling on the roof. It crossed over Sam’s head on its way to the gutter, then stopped about a yard left of the window. Dean silently tracked it with the tool, which looked like some kind of awl, raised over his head and pointed as if he was planning to stab the feet of whoever it was.

Where the hell was Luther? Frowning, Sam almost took a step back before he realized that he probably couldn’t do the whole no-creaking-boards thing and instead stayed where he was. But if he leaned very, very carefully, he found that he could see a sliver of the lot behind the house through the window. He should’ve been able to see Luther, but he didn’t.

He did see Luther’s horse, standing with its reins dragging in the dust as if it’d just been abandoned. It did occur to Sam that maybe Luther was the one on the roof, but—

\--“You again.” That was Luther’s voice, and he’d moved but he definitely was still on the ground. “The hell are you doing up there, _boy_? Think you’re gonna fly down on me like some hawk?”

Luther was putting some kind of extra snarling rumble into his voice, something that slid uneasily around beneath Sam’s skin. He glanced over: Dean’s shoulders were hunched tightly up, and his upper lip was trying to curl. And his eyes were glowing just a little, like someone had put a few drops of foxfire in them.

The vampire on the roof didn’t answer. He moved around some more, always changing directions just when Dean had started to hunker down for a good try at shish-kabobing through _wood planks_. Which really wasn’t a good idea, come to think of it, but when Sam reached over, he hadn’t even touched Dean before the other man had jerked around to glower a warning.

Dean wasn’t exactly in there right now, Sam suddenly understood. It was more than a little frightening—and honestly, a part of Sam was also fucking _pissed_. Because Dean should know who he was, even in the grip of some crazy territorial rage—he should _know_. He should—

“Last time, I was warning you. I got no quarrel with you or your maker, but…” Thick drawl, really laying on the menace. It sounded like Luther was pacing back and forth, just out of view of the window. “In fact, if you’ve got any sense, you’ll call for him. Her,” he went on in a deceptively soft voice. “Let your elders talk it out—you little _bitch_!”

At first Sam was confused, since Luther had been talking like the vampire was a man, but then a violent scuffle broke out just as footsteps pounded across the roof. In the opposite direction. So more than one of them.

There were two boarded-up windows and an old doorway on that side, too. Sam threw himself to the ground just as something tried to smash its way through 

“Sam!” Dean spun around and lunged forward, into the cloud of splintering wood and dust that billowed up. The awl flashed out, and then the dust blocked everything from view.

But Sam could still hear. And he heard the ragged crunch of flesh being stabbed to the bone, and the pained shout, and the wet, sucking pop of a weapon being yanked free of a body. He staggered backwards, then jerked and cursed when something clawed at his shoulder. He tried to pull himself away, but the other person was too quick and dragged him right up against the window, sharp nails ripping at his coat and then yanking up to score over his throat and jaw. Fuck, _fucking_ bastards—

\--a horrible, agonized scream rose up behind him just as a sudden heat slapped into his shoulder and down across his chest, following the arm that had been wrapped around him. Now it let go of him like he was—well, it was on fire. On fire and flailing, and when Sam looked at himself after stumbling free, he wasn’t even scorched.

He twisted around just in time to see a spray arc up over Dean as he hacked at a body on the ground. His vision jittered around, showing him snapshots of sprawled legs, blood coating Dean’s hand past the wrist, someone yelling through the broken window. Sam stared blindly at the angry mouth, watching it distort around words he didn’t hear, and he couldn’t understand…he could. That was a regular person. They wanted to know…

“…goddamn Free-Staters? What’s goin’ on? Or maybe you’re—”

“What the hell does it look like?” Sam snapped. He had no idea what the right answer was, but he just wanted the idiots outside to get out of the way. Wanted it so much he could almost feel it pressing itself into the air.

The man outside went oddly slack, then gave himself a shake and nodded apologetically. “Sorry, you look like right good young men. Didn’t mean no…so damn hard to tell, these Northern asses comin’ in so thick…you just keep on teaching that godless sodomite his lesson, boy.”

That last one was to Dean, who stiffened. Then he straightened up enough to look that way, but by then the man had suddenly disappeared. Lucky for him, since then Dean turned to look at Sam, and even though the rage and sheer aggravation in Dean’s face had faded a little, it was still enough to put Sam on his guard. Blood was smeared all over Dean’s throat and downwards; his shirt had been ripped half-open and his fangs had dropped. His lower jaw hung in a feral wolf-grin that didn’t have a speck of good humor in it.

“Fire! Somebody’s set fire to the Methodist church!” came a shout from the street. It was soon echoed by many others.

Dean jerked around again, then stepped over the vampire he’d just messily decapitated and got over to the back window in two steps; he grabbed Sam’s arm along the way so Sam was dragged along. “Out.”

Sam yanked himself free and glared at Dean before he really knew what he was doing. “No. Wait—”

Something peculiar happened then. Dean’s eyes widened and he trembled a little. Then he suddenly dropped his head, breath hissing through his teeth.

A crash in the back distracted Sam and he glanced out the window, trying to figure out what was going on before he went that way. He saw a big dark thing fly towards him and ducked before the vampire slammed into the window, shaking out glass panes that shattered on the floor. Then he looked up just in time to see Luther slash out with a…a scythe? Luther stood back a second later so Sam could see the blade, and it was shaped the same, but the whole thing plus its short handle wasn’t much bigger than a steering wheel. He must’ve gotten it from one of the vampires.

After a moment, Luther absently wiped at his face and raised his head. He caught Sam’s eye, then backed up to show that it was safe.

Sam wasted no time getting through the window, which was a lot harder this time since the wood was bloody. He accidentally glimpsed the body beneath it a couple times, but otherwise determinedly ignored it. Once he was through, he took a leap and landed clear. He stayed facing forward. 

Dean jumped a bare second later and messed up his landing, tripping so he landed heavily against Sam’s back; a nasty squishing sound came from the ground where Dean’s foot would’ve come down. He cursed and stumbled back upright, coming around Sam while disgustedly shaking his foot. “God, isn’t this great? This was a really great way to keep them from coming after—”

“They’re yelling about a fire. Did you do it?” Luther asked. The right sleeve of his coat had been slashed twice, the higher cut going almost all the way around his arm. He kept twisting around so the blood welling up in the tears made it look like his arm was about to fall off. “What the hell is that?”

“Is what? And no, I didn’t start that fire. I didn’t even know this place had a church.” Sam grabbed Dean’s elbow and began to straighten him out, then paused. An acrid stink filled up his nose so it felt like the cells on the inside were shriveling up and dying. He suddenly was very warm, almost as if he were surrounded by flames, and he was getting increasingly angry. Only it wasn’t…he wasn’t sure why he was angry; it was like he was separated from the whole thing.

Dean drew air in sharply through his nose. He’d twisted his hand around to hold onto Sam’s wrist so Sam could feel a nervous shaking start inside the other man. “Come on. Sam, come on, let’s go. We can try again tomorrow, but right now it’s not a good time.”

They backed up a few feet, but then Sam stopped when he heard something whoosh up behind him. He whipped around and ducked at the same time, then yanked down a strangely stupefied Dean just before the horse would’ve smashed in Dean’s skull with its fore-hooves. The animal was going nuts, worse than it ever had around Dean or Luther: it reared repeatedly, each time jerking itself higher and higher till finally it snapped the reins from the post to which it’d been tied.

The sound of the reins breaking was covered up not by the horse’s shrill scream, but by another sound that slowly but irresistibly wormed its way into Sam’s consciousness: the crackle-and-pop of burning wood.

“Jesus—Sam—knock it the fuck off—” Dean had gone after the panicking horse and now was bouncing from foot to foot in front of it, dangerously close. He alternated between trying to snatch at the flying reins and trying to yell over his shoulder at Sam. “Let’s go!”

“Get on.” Sam leaped back a few feet when the horse blundered his way, then urgently gestured at Dean. “ _Get on!_ ” he barked.

A shout from the street out front made Sam spun around, terrified that the townspeople had noticed something unnatural was going on. When he turned back, Dean had somehow gotten onto the horse’s back—wild jump, from the way he was precariously crouched on the saddle like a racing jockey. A sudden gust of wind strengthened the sulfur stench by two or three times; it also blew fragments of wood past Sam.

He grabbed one, then flung it at the horse’s haunches before he could think twice. The horse bucked so Dean almost fell off, then took off like a shot. It looked like it was heading for the edge of town, so aside from cursing Sam out till his throat was raw, Dean would probably be okay.

“That’s not the demon.” It hadn’t been more than two minutes, tops. Luther was still in the same spot, clutching his bloody arm. He twisted on his heel to stare at the top of the building to their left and just behind him, Sam caught a glimpse of something charred black, with shockingly white bone-tips sticking out of it. “It’s not the same smell. Not exactly. But it’s _of_ the demon, and it’s…”

“I didn’t burn the church,” Sam slowly said. He looked at the vampire he _had_ burned—he guessed they could add that alongside beheading, since it didn’t look like that son of a bitch was going to revive—then at Luther. “I saw Brown—saw his ghost. Earlier. In town.”

“And you didn’t mention it to—of course you didn’t. You never goddamn talk about anything important until it…and you sent off Dean. Well…Jesus goddamn Christ. Great,” Luther snarled, turning around. Then he twisted back so he was facing away from Sam, but he didn’t seem to like not being able to watch Sam so he kept glancing over his shoulder. “What the hell are you trying to pull, Sam?”

It sounded like most of the people were way at the other end of the town, where if Sam squinted, he could see a turbid orange glow filtering up into the sky. He took two steps sideways so he was standing right next to Luther. “What if Brown wasn’t human when they hanged him?”

“He has a grave,” Luther said, but his voice was a little shaky.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like we dug it up to see if there was a body in it.” And these vampires zeroing in on them at Brown’s old shop, and the well-timed distractions of the townspeople. But what Sam still couldn’t figure out was how Brown would’ve survived, because the thing Sam had seen had really felt like a ghost.

And when their dad had been possessed by the demon itself, Dean hadn’t been able to tell. There was no way Sam was letting Dean get possessed; he wasn’t losing the last member of his family that way. Not again. So yeah, he’d sent him off.

“All right. All right, I can see where you’re going.” Oddly enough, Luther seemed to be calming down. He’d finally picked a spot to watch and had stopped turning around and around. “But if you’re going to use me to stall it, why aren’t you running?”

“If I kill the demon now, then maybe we go back and my girlfriend and my parents are alive, and Dean’s not a vampire, and none of this ever happened,” Sam said. “Nobody gets hurt just because they knew me.”

Luther blinked a few times, thinking hard. Then his face smoothed and he slowly nodded. “Makes sense.”

“Good—” The warmth around Sam heated up in one direction and he was turning to face it when suddenly the back of his head exploded in pain. His knees went, and he swung out for a grip, a handhold, anything, only to feel his hand brush down Luther’s arm as the bastard stepped away. Blackness squeezed out the world from his vision.

* * *

“Sam?”

The word was garbled, stretched out and inhumanly deep. It made the ache on the side of Sam’s head surge up so he groaned, trying to lift his hands so he could press it out of his skull. Only his wrists got grabbed instead. Somebody was leaning over him, shaking so hard that the tremors passed up Sam’s arms so grass rustled and rasped beneath him, their breath fervid and warm.

“Oh, my God, Sammy. You’re okay. You’re—God, I’m going to kill that bastard.”

Bas—Luther, Brown, the vampires, the _demon_. Everything slammed back into Sam’s head and built up into an incredible rage so intense it leaked acid into his mouth and ate white holes in his vision.

He laid where he was for a moment, thinking it all through, and then sat up. Dean tried to stop him, but Sam shrugged him off so he could look around.

They were way, way out of town. Pawnee looked like a collection of toy houses on the horizon, and in every other direction that Sam looked, he saw a desolate sea of brown. The moon had long since passed its zenith, but he thought it looked like they might still have a couple hours till dawn. “How the hell did I get out here?”

“Huh? Didn’t you—there’s a horse.” Dean pointed. “It’s…um…not one of the ones we had before.”

“Because…the other one must’ve run off. So he threw me on a different one.” Sam’s wrists felt chafed, and when he moved, thin loops of bruising around his chest revealed themselves. “Was I on the horse?”

“You were tied to it…what’s going on? What happened? Where’s Luther, and—and goddamn it, Sam, if you _ever_ \--”

Okay, Luther had knocked him out and then gotten him out of town. Brown hadn’t shown up out here, so apparently Luther had then stayed behind to delay him, and he’d done that because he didn’t think Sam should tackle the demon right now, thus saving them all a hell of a lot of trouble later. That fucking double-dealing bastard.

“—Sam, are you even listening to me—”

“No.” Sam started towards the horse. Then Dean grabbed his elbow and he was forced to turn back around, which was just slowing them down even more from finding out what was going on, and—

\--and Sam’s hand ended up around Dean’s throat, and Dean was wide-eyed with shock and fear and something else, something that’d been coming up with increasing frequency lately and that’d also been in Luther’s eyes. It worried Sam. It really did, but they didn’t have time and the more they lingered, the less able he was going to be at keeping the demon from getting Dean, and would Dean just _listen_ to him? “Brown didn’t die. He’s with the demon and he’s what’s been throwing us. I was going to take care of him, but Luther hit me before I could.”

“Okay. Okay…Jesus, we just can’t get away from this thing, can we?” Dean said after a moment. He spoke very slowly and gingerly, eyes nervously flicking over Sam’s face. His fingers unexpectedly bumped into the back of Sam’s hand.

Surprised, Sam tightened his grip a fraction. Dean’s eyes widened a little more and he dropped his hand. He stared at Sam for a few seconds longer, then suddenly lowered his gaze as well. And this made Sam relax, but only till he’d gotten his hand off Dean’s throat and his brain started to catch up with what he’d been doing. “Oh, fuck. Fuck. Dean—sorry—I just—we have to go. We have to go now, and we’ve got to kill Brown. No arguing.”

“Well, I’ve got no problem with that. If Brown survived a hanging, then he’s something we kill even without the demon connection,” Dean replied, hurried so his words tumbled over each other. He kept on looking at the ground while he rubbed his throat. “But Jesus, Sam. Something’s gotten into you and it’s not good, and I don’t think getting close to anything to do with the demon’s gonna help it. I don’t—”

“I’m not staying back here.” The anger simmered back to life, though Sam did his damnedest to at least keep it from boiling over again. “I’m not going to sit around so the demon can waltz around and get to me through everyone else. Dad was the absolute last one.”

Dean paused, then looked sharply up. “Sam, Dad killed himself to save us.”

“You think? He could’ve killed himself because it told him we’d _fucked_ , and he thought he didn’t have a reason to stay alive. No—listen, he could’ve fought. Dad was the most goddamn stubborn man I’ve ever met—he could’ve fought for the ten goddamn minutes I needed to finish exorcising him, but he didn’t. He shot himself.” Sam had gone over those moments again and again in his head, trying to figure out where things had gone wrong, and that was the conclusion that kept popping out at him. Everything he and Dean and their dad had done, they’d done because they were trying to survive, to make the best of a situation till it could be fixed. They’d made the effort. If it hadn’t worked, it’d been because the demon had been working harder against them and they’d missed that.

“That’s not—you don’t know that. And even if that’s true—which it’s _not_ \--how is it going to help to march right up to the demon? It can still get to you,” Dean protested. He raised his hands as if he were going to grab Sam’s shoulders.

So Sam intercepted them and wrapped his fingers around Dean’s wrists. He ended up pulling his brother forward a few inches, but that was fine since maybe the closer they were, the better Dean would get what Sam meant. Feel the meaning, get it through the air or something because Sam was running out of words. “No—don’t you get it? If it could, it would’ve taken me by now. It wouldn’t have tried to take away my powers with some magic necklace. It can’t get to me with the direct route. We need to _go_ , Dean.”

Dean opened his mouth.

“We can take care of it right here, right now,” Sam hurriedly added. He belatedly realized he was squeezing Dean’s wrists too hard when the other man winced and let go, but he just—he needed Dean to understand. He cupped his hands around Dean’s jaw and pulled Dean forward so they were touching foreheads. “We can change what’s going to happen. We can make it so Dad lives. But we have to go. _I_ have to go. Please, Dean.”

The moment their heads had bumped into each other, Dean had hissed in a breath, as if he were in pain. His eyes squeezed shut so the flesh at the corners began to whiten; the pressure gradually lightened as he listened to Sam, but he still didn’t open his eyes. He lifted his hand and let it rest on Sam’s wrist, then slowly curled his fingers to press Sam’s hand harder into his cheek. His head slightly turned in that direction, too. His breath slowed.

“C’mon, Dean,” Sam whispered. Almost. They were almost there. Just a little further and Dean would say yes. “Do this for me.”

Dean shivered, then nodded.

Sam let out a long sigh of relief. Much longer than he’d expected, so he must have been holding his breath for the last part of it. He started to turn back to the horse, but then paused: Dean had opened his eyes, and his expression had been stricken. But when Sam looked again, Dean was facing the other way, and they were running out of time. He shook off the chill and walked towards the horse.

* * *

The whole town was still in an uproar, but mostly on the opposite side so Sam and Dean didn’t have much trouble sneaking back into town. They found the scene behind the bordello gruesome and awful and largely undisturbed, as if something was directing people around the spot so nobody had raised the alarm yet.

Dean picked up a trail pretty easily, which didn’t sit well with him. “He wants us to follow. And—Sam? They dragged Luther out of here alive. He bled all over the place, but…”

“Which way?” For some reason, Sam had sent the horse off as soon as they’d gotten down, so Dean hoped to God Brown wasn’t far away. If Sam was so concerned about time, then he really should’ve kept the horse.

And if Sam’s thinking really had anything to do with logic right now, then Dean’s stomach wouldn’t be wrapped several times around his spine, and said spine wouldn’t be all wrenched about so he couldn’t seem to come up with a decent objection. This wasn’t his brother he was talking to, pointing out the direction and the best way to get there. It wasn’t Sam, and…and yet it was, because Dean couldn’t just turn around real fast and knock him out till his sense came back. But it was all twisted backwards so it was a Sam Dean had never, ever wanted to see.

Luther had to have noticed. That was what all the business about knocking Sam out and roping him to a horse had been about. When they caught up, if the prick was still alive, Dean guessed he’d have to thank Luther for that instead of kill him.

“Let’s go,” Sam muttered, already taking off. He periodically cocked his head, as if he were listening to something Dean couldn’t hear. That wouldn’t be too surprising…actually, that’d be a relief if that were the explanation. Then it’d be an easy problem to fix, but somehow Dean doubted that.

The trail wound its way back out of town, then curved around to go parallel with the edge of Pawnee for a while. They’d walked maybe a third of the way around when it abruptly veered back into town…and took them up to the back of the only stone-built building in town.

“It’s gonna be the capitol, so they say,” muttered a bystander when asked. For some reason, there seemed to be a lot of people milling about the place. “You heard who they got locked in there?”

“Locked? I…uh, I just walked past the jail,” Dean said. They hadn’t, but he was pretty sure that they didn’t build cells into state capitol buildings. Not even in the Wild West.

The man looked oddly at him. “Yeah, but it’s so damn shoddy you couldn’t keep a rat in the place.” He suddenly grinned. “Didn’t you see ‘em take that goddamn Free-Stater out of there earlier and hang him?”

“We…missed the first part of that.” Sometimes, like now, Dean came very close to wishing they were allowed to kill psychopathic people. “What’s going on now?”

“They caught the bastard who set the Methodist church on fire. Some out-of-towner…heard he was a Texan. Reckon there’s going to be a second hanging soon, seeing as we’re all already worked up.” Then the guy had a thought and peered more closely at Dean. “Hey, where you from? I’ve been here six months and never seen you…never heard an accent like yours, either.”

Sam had been standing back and letting them talk, but now he shouldered forward. “ _Don’t worry about it_.”

Then he walked on, aiming for a relatively unwatched side-door in the building. Dean hung back a second to stare at the man they’d been talking to; he looked vaguely puzzled for a second, then turned away as if the last couple minutes hadn’t happened. Maybe as if he wasn’t even seeing Dean.

So it wasn’t just Dean, and Sam really was putting something into his voice now, something that acted kind of like a hypnotic suggestion. If you were on guard, you could resist it…and if you were human, probably. It was pretty ironic, considering vampires were supposed to be the ones who could mesmerize things.

Dean quickly caught up with Sam and hooked his fingers around Sam’s elbow. He couldn’t quite bring himself to pull the other man to a stop, but he managed to get Sam paying attention to him. “There are a lot of people around. What—”

Sam grabbed the door handle and pulled. It wasn’t locked. He went inside without even pausing to acknowledge how weird that was, dragging Dean with him. “How many of them are inside the building?”

It took a moment to figure that out. The inside of the place had been freshly done with paint or plaster or something that screwed with Dean’s nose, so he had to go with hearing. “Maybe…no, they’re leaving. Two vamps, though. Besides Luther. They’re in the basement. And…and there’s somebody else, but I can barely hear him. Brown, I guess. Sam—”

“Not now, Dean. But thanks,” Sam said. His head was cocked again. “This shouldn’t take too long.”

“Sam—”

Sam shrugged him off and turned into a narrow stairwell. The smell of fresh blood was so strong even Sam had to be picking up on it. And he was, his expression going coldly blank and the way he held his head changing, getting more aggressive. “They know we’re coming, so no point in trying to creep down.”

And that was when the stairwell burst into flames.


	4. Cutting the Loop

Fire. At first Sam couldn’t believe it. They were trying that? After everything—but then, all of that hadn’t happened yet here.

Dean slammed back against Sam, then twisted around and grabbed him. “Sam! We have to get out!”

“I know,” Sam hissed. He was fine, but Dean was freaking out, pushing at him and coughing so hard that he nearly toppled down the narrow steps several times.

The smoke wouldn’t hurt Dean, but the fire would, and might even kill him if what Sam had done to the other vampire was any indication. He grabbed Dean’s arm and yanked them further down the steps, but only managed to get down one before Dean pulled back, shouting something. They didn’t have the time for it—the steps were already cracking beneath their feet—and so Sam just threw his arm around Dean’s waist and jerked. Hard.

It was a short staircase, so they didn’t have too far to go. The building was made of stone, but the floor was wood, and there were wood benches along the walls that had caught fire from the flaming cinders flying out of the stairwell. Sparks spat out of the stairs over Dean’s arm and he hissed, stumbling so he hit the basement floor on his knees. He batted furiously at his sleeve and seemed to manage to put it out.

Another shower of sparks came down on Sam, but he wasn’t all that surprised when he didn’t catch fire. He just got angrier.

“Hey!” Shapes moved on the other side of the room, flashing back and forth so Sam couldn’t get a fix on them.

Aside from that, the vampires weren’t all that bright. The first one made a straight charge at Sam and completely missed Dean, who lunged up from the floor to tackle him sideways. The second one was a little more cautious and hung back, but Sam caught him with a fake feint and spun aside to let the vamp’s momentum carry him straight into the fiery stairs.

Dean was still busy with his on the floor, but he seemed to have that in hand so Sam pushed on through the smoke, which was thick enough now to make even him cough. He couldn’t see very well, but a door was furiously rattling somewhere on the left wall, so he aimed for that. When he ran into it, he made it crack wide open.

Something fell out at him so he jerked back, but then he reached out and steadied Luther. He still didn’t know where Brown was, but the bastard hadn’t left the floor.

“What the _hell_ are you doing here?” Luther hissed. His wrists were manacled in front of him and blood bubbled from the corner of his mouth. “You—”

“Which way’s out?” Brown had to have a backdoor. “Can you show Dean?”

Luther swayed against Sam, looking like he didn’t know whether he wanted to pass out or hit Sam more. Then his eyes snapped to something behind Sam.

Sam felt the air scream away from him as he lashed out at the space behind him. Then he jerked as his push ran up against an opposing force. He turned around, hauling Luther with him, and as soon as he figured out where Dean was, he shoved Luther that way. “ _Get him out_.”

Then he turned back. The smoke was clearing, and the figure of a man was slowly coming into view. The eyes were what Sam saw first: large, dark, unearthly. Then the white, mocking smile.

“Well, it’s nice to finally see what all this fuss is about,” Brown said, his voice lilting in a jeer. A familiar jeer—Meg’s jeer. “What’s your name?”

“Sam,” Sam replied, feeling his mouth stretch into a humorless curve. The rage stacked up on itself inside of him so each layer compressed the ones below it till he was shaking, it took so much effort to keep it down. He held it for a little bit longer, just until Brown’s mask started to slip—and then he let it go.

The world exploded, but this time it was when _he_ wanted it to. It was his heat, his flames licking around his feet, and so he was comfortable because he knew it wasn’t going to touch what he didn’t want it to. And it’d completely incinerate whatever he did want it to.

* * *

Beheading a vampire with nothing more than brute strength and a door wasn’t exactly easy. Doing it while the whole goddamn place went up in flames and Sam was fucking around thinking he was some magical demon-destroyer was right up there with the hardest things Dean had ever done.

And the moment he’d finished, Luther fell on top of him. Dean nearly ripped out the bastard’s throat before he realized who it was, and then he came pretty close to doing that anyway. Instead he snatched out at random, got hold of Luther’s arm—painful wince at that—and jerked him up against the wall. “Sam?”

“There’s a tunnel. They were using this place as a lair—it was just built so they could do that.” Luther looked like crap. The smoke seemed to be getting to him some, but since he didn’t really need air the same way people did, he shouldn’t have been too worried. Actually, he should’ve been fucking ecstatic that somebody had come back for him, but instead he looked like he’d just seen the end of the world cresting the horizon. “He wants you out of here.”

“Not without him,” Dean snarled. “Sam? _Sam_!”

The clouded air suddenly billowed out in one direction, turning from gray-white to an oily black, and the clean ash-smell of charred wood drowned in a surging wave of the stink of sweetish, sickening burnt flesh. It turned Dean’s stomach almost inside out so he started to drop to the floor; he’d crawl back to his brother if he had to—

“ _Get out_.”

No. No, not without Sam, and Dean fought for that. He opened his mouth and tried to squeeze the words through the iron bands that were constricting his throat, he dug his nails into the floor and refused to go backwards. Even if he couldn’t go forwards, he couldn’t leave. The order had sunk into his muscles and bones so he was shaking with the effort of staying in place. His nails were starting to peel up one of the floorboards, but he wasn’t—he wasn’t—

“ _Out_.”

Dean’s fingers jerked themselves from the floor. The strain he’d been under meant the moment they did, he had toppled backwards, and once he was moving, he couldn’t stop. He could feel water sizzling down his cheeks, leaving burns in its wake, and he was wildly shaking his head, but he didn’t stop till he’d blundered into a cool draft, till he’d found the tunnel from which it was coming and run through it and emerged from the ground into some building. The edge of the trapdoor or whatever the hell it was tripped him up so he fell to one knee.

He kept on going, bending till his forehead was pressed to the floor. Goddamn it, goddamn it, they’d been so…he’d sworn it was never going to get that far with Sam. Maybe Sam wasn’t going to let Dean get taken, but didn’t he have the right to want the same thing for Sam? What the hell made Sam’s wants more important? What the hell was wrong with _Dean_ , that he couldn’t stand and hold his goddamn ground for the most important moment of his life? That he couldn’t—fight-- _Sam_ \--

At first, he didn’t hear anything but the fire roaring back at the other end of the shaft—that and the harsh, racking sobs that were the only way he could breathe. Then other noises started to filter through: panicked shouting, splashing water. Cracking wood. The slithery scratching of rough fabric over wood.

Dean turned his head and blinked till the tears cleared out enough for him to see. Luther was slumped about five feet away, curled in on himself. He actually looked really sorry. Sorry and completely miserable. “He told me the same way,” he said. “Look…Dean…if he was that far along, then this works out. Now you don’t have to kill—”

“You coldblooded son of a _bitch_!”

Breaking Luther’s neck wouldn’t kill him, but it’d make Dean feel a lot better. In fact, he was already cheering up just from gouging his fingers around Luther’s throat, and once he found something with an edge in this place, they were really going to start partying. His fingers fit really nicely into the grooves between the bumps of Luther’s spine, and he could already feel the bones beginning to creak, and the bastard wasn’t going to talk about Sam like that now, was he? He wasn’t going to sit on his high horse and—and—and he wasn’t even fighting back. He wasn’t…the _prick_. Well, Dean wasn’t going to do his dirty work for him. If Dean couldn’t—nobody was going to get off easy.

He sank back, feeling like lead was being piped into his limbs, and slowly let his hands slide off Luther’s throat. Luther stayed on his back, staring straight up at the ceiling. His neck was still all together, but the only sign of life from him was the occasional blink.

If there’d been room, that would’ve been what Dean would’ve been doing, but wherever they were now was too cramped: there were dusty stacks of chairs in the way and great, some kind of furniture store. Fucking great. Everything was just…

…somebody was walking in the tunnel. Dean frowned and crawled over to the trapdoor, sure he had to be hearing wrong, but no, those were footsteps.

The only other thing that could’ve gotten out of that fire was…but Dean just crouched on the edge and didn’t make any move towards getting a weapon or defending himself or anything. And it wasn’t that it didn’t matter any more, that it was kind of pointless anyway, but…he inhaled sharply and deeply, but he couldn’t smell anything besides cinders. If what he was wildly hoping was in there, he wasn’t able to tell. He just had to sit and wait and listen as the thing in the tunnel came closer, closer, and finally stepped to where Dean could see.

A ferocious kind of pain seized up in Dean’s chest, crushing around his heart, and then suddenly relaxed. But it wasn’t replaced with relief—no, he sagged back with something more like terror. Then he quickly scrambled backwards on his hands and knees till he ran up against something that groaned: Luther. He couldn’t go any farther then.

Fingers appeared over the edge of the hole, clean and pale. They bent, knuckling over with strain. Then Sam hauled himself up with a grunt and swung over his legs to land heavily on the floor. His face was grey with exhaustion, but he didn’t have a single burn anywhere on him…he didn’t even have soot marks on his clothes.

He glanced around, then saw Dean. His shoulders slumped and he tiredly, brilliantly smiled with relief. “Oh, thank God. Are you okay?”

Dean opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again.

“Oh…I burned her up. Him.” A tiny wrinkle briefly appeared between Sam’s eyebrows. “It was Meg. I mean, the same demon that’d been in Meg’s body. I think—I didn’t get her, but I took care of Brown’s body and if she is still alive, then it’ll be a really long time before she can find another one that good.”

He sounded…kind of jacked up, as if they were coming off a job done neatly and without much bloodshed. He looked the same, he moved the same, he talked the same, but it was still all wrong.

“Listen, I’m sorry about earlier, but—” The shouts from the street were getting closer; Sam glanced at the window, then grimaced and put his hand to his head. He had to be too tired to use his powers now. “—yeah, we need to go. Come on. Can you get Luther?”

Luther, as a matter of fact, now had a death-grip on Dean’s elbow. The moment Sam turned away to check on what was going outside, he yanked himself up to Dean’s ear. “We need to talk about him,” he hissed.

Then he dropped back, and when Dean twisted around to look, it seemed like Luther was pretty much out of it for a while.

“Dean?” Sam said. He was a little curt, and the reverberations in his voice made Dean duck his head. “What’s the problem?”

“Hang on a second,” Dean replied after a moment. He slowly got up and started about getting Luther over his shoulder. Yeah, they’d talk. He’d listen to…to Sam for now, and then he’d get Luther to actually tell him what the hell had happened, and then he was going to stop whatever was happening to Sam before he completely lost his brother. No matter what it took.

* * *

With all the lynchings and near-lynchings and fires going on, there was no way they could’ve sneaked out of town without being noticed. This didn’t seem to trouble Sam very much; he picked out a house only a stone’s throw from the capitol building, which was still pouring sluggish puffs of smoke from its windows. The house was fully furnished and it looked as if the people who lived in it had just stepped out for a second: the embers in the fireplace were warm and someone had left a half-mended bridle on the kitchen table.

The whole place smelled like vampires, which was the only reason why Dean didn’t balk at using it. Not that he felt comfortable about it. On the contrary, his molars were locked together so he wouldn’t grind his teeth, and he had to keep telling himself that ripping up the furniture and the walls and the ceiling was a totally irrational reaction.

He didn’t have the energy to not walk around as if he might get jumped at every corner. Sam, on the other hand, had settled in like it was his second home. He’d taken over one of the backrooms and was doing something with a bowl and some blood from a caged chicken that’d been in the kitchen. Which reminded Dean a lot of Meg, since she was suddenly coming up everywhere he turned now. Bitch was more persistent than her fucking daddy-demon, or however the hell they were related.

Once he was sure Sam wouldn’t notice—God, he was hiding from his own brother—he went back up onto the second floor. They’d left Luther on the floor of what looked like a bedroom with a bucket of water and a bunch of rags. Then Sam had gone back down, and Dean had followed, anxious to know if he hadn’t been hallucinating all the changes, if he still had a brother. It hadn’t been too fair to Luther, but then, he hadn’t raised any objections. He’d probably been relieved to get away from Sam.

To be honest, so was Dean. He hated it and it made him want to puke, but when he was upstairs, he didn’t feel so much like he needed to…like crawling around beneath Sam’s feet was the normal thing to do. Like it was something he wanted to do.

He wasn’t hallucinating. Sam had changed, and like that. It was all real, and God, it was worse than Dad shooting himself.

Luther was slightly less bloody, but still on the floor. It didn’t look like he’d touched the rags at all, and he didn’t open his eyes to look at Dean till Dean was standing right next to him. Then the first thing he did was try to peer behind Dean.

“He’s downstairs. I think he’s casting for Meg, trying to see where she went,” Dean muttered, getting down on his knees. He glanced in the bucket: the water there had the faintest tinge of pink to it. “My God…he wasn’t even _burned_.”

“That’s why the demon wanted him so badly. Perfect vessel.” It was hard to make out what Luther was saying, both because his voice was weak and because he was talking to the floor. He hissed when Dean touched his shoulder, and all Dean had been doing was trying to peel off his coat to get to wherever the blood was coming from. “Why the hell didn’t you keep him out of town? Goddamn it, there was a chance then. But now—”

The coat and the shirt under it were too gummed-up, so Dean took out his knife and started cutting. He ignored the noises Luther made, and tried to ignore all the delicious-smelling blood on him. “Look, I tried. Believe me, I tried. But he—just—he did—I couldn’t say no.”

“Shit.” Luther closed his eyes. For all the sucked-in breaths and harsh moans he was making, he wasn’t moving around very much. Even when Dean started squeezing the clots out of his wounds. “Don’t let him get near my blood.”

“What? Why the hell would he, anyway?” Dean snapped. A loud thud from downstairs made him freeze, but Sam didn’t come up so he went back to working on Luther. He did lower his voice. “What’d he need that for?”

“What do you think? Living longer so he can chase down the demon, Meg, whichever one it is. But—he can’t—you can’t let him. That’s exactly what they want him to do.” Beneath all the dirt and blood, Luther was going really pale, his skin turning papery to touch. “That’s why they left you alone and went through that whole lynching act with me. Goddamn it, the one goddamn time you should’ve left me to die—”

Dean had gotten Luther more or less stripped to the waist by that point, and rinsed down enough so that he could see the injuries. Legs were okay, face was fine aside from a bruised-up jaw. Most of the blood seemed to be coming from several deep, parallel slashes on Luther’s back, which were definitely going to need stitches. Some of them went down to the bone. “Would you shut the fuck up? Like right now’s a good time to argue—could you just tell me what the hell you’re thinking, for once in your fucking life? This need-to-know dribbling is complete bullshit.”

The cuts on Luther’s arm probably would need sewing-up as well. And the line of his ribcage was crinkled in places, so a couple broken ribs. After some thought, Dean figured there was as good as any a place to start. He angled his hands around the first one, then pressed down till he felt a turgid shift in the muscle and heard a click.

Luther banged his face into the ground and kept it shoved down till Dean had finished. Okay, maybe he was hurt, but he really needed to fill Dean in soon or else Sam would come up and…and Dean didn’t know what would happen. He couldn’t predict Sam anymore.

Dean knotted up linen strips around Luther’s ribs when he’d finished resetting them, which wouldn’t completely prevent the bones from shifting, but then it’d been a rough job anyway, so somebody still would’ve had to adjust them. Just as he was finishing that up, Luther finally started to talk. “My friend, the one going after the demon…he had a theory. Demons don’t have bodies, so they have to possess people. But they can’t keep people from aging and if the bodies get hurt, they can’t heal them—they just have to keep them going till the body falls apart. Something about people being imperf—no, impure.”

“Impure?” Some rummaging around in a nearby dresser turned up needle and thread, which meant Dean didn’t have to go back downstairs for it. He nudged at Luther to roll over, then bit down on a sigh and helped when it became obvious Luther couldn’t do it himself.

“Demons are higher beings than us. They don’t naturally have flesh because they’re so refined,” Luther muttered. A muffled grating sound said he was ripping at the floor with his nails to keep still. “Platonic ideal of evil.”

When Dean pushed the needle through the lip of the first cut, the thread pulled right out. He grimaced and pulled the thread through pinched fingers to squeeze off the blood, then checked the cut. He’d picked a spot far enough away from the slash, but…Luther had lost too much blood and his flesh was turning too delicate. “Platonic what?”

“Hell if I know. I’m just repeating what Ivan said. He was the educated one—he’d been to theology school.” Luther had closed his eyes. There were bloodless white rings around them, and around his mouth, too.

Goddamn it. But…no, short of asking Sam to get some converted blood made up, there wasn’t any other way. And Dean wasn’t about to ask Sam to do any more magic right now, let alone something that involved hurting anything. For all…for all he knew, Sam might be okay now with pulling somebody off the street and draining them for Luther. If it could be twisted around so that it was ‘to help them kill the demon.’ “And you never bothered to look it up with all the time you had?”

“Plato’s some damn philosopher. I looked up what I could use,” Luther snapped.

After a moment, Dean let a slightly hysterical chuckle escape him. He could understand that. “Okay, point.”

Luther frowned, then cracked open an eye to look up. He opened the other one, and widened both when Dean shoved his wrist in the son of a bitch’s face.

“Hurry up,” Dean hissed. “Longer you take, more I have to think about what I’m doing.”

After a long, considering look, Luther craned his head forward. His mouth closed around Dean’s wrist, and a moment later, his teeth pricked into it. He didn’t bite that hard, so if Dean stared at the far wall and tried to make out what people were saying on the street outside, he could almost ignore it.

“Maybe ‘distilled’ would make more sense,” Luther mumbled, briefly drawing back. He leaned forward again, but just to lap instead of suck. “Because the idea…there are people in the world who can take a demon better than normal people, but they’re still human. If you could get rid of that, make them pure…then you’d have somebody who wouldn’t just be possessed. The demon would be able to make them heal, to stop their aging—to really have the body, not just use it.”

“All the shit with fire,” Dean muttered after a moment. That’d always been the demon’s trademark. “But…how would that work?”

Luther took a last lick, then let his head drop back just about when Dean had been thinking of telling him enough. He looked up at Dean through slitted eyes. “Ivan had this grand explanation for it all, but I don’t remember it that well. He told a story, though—a Greek myth about Achilles. Man was born half-god, and his mother wanted to make him immortal so every night she put him in the middle of a fire so a little more of his humanity burned away.”

“Roll over. I’m not done.” Dean yanked a tight bandage around his wrist, then picked up the needle and thread again. This time when he tried the stitch, the flesh held the thread. “So what happened to Achilles? I know—I know he died later.”

“His father—he caught the mother at it one night and didn’t understand what was going on, so he yanked Achilles out…Achilles stayed human. I think that’s how it—” Luther cut himself up and half-rose so Dean nearly sank the needle straight into his back. He hissed, but not like he was really paying attention to that.

Since he’d been listening to Luther, Dean hadn’t heard the footsteps. He did smell Sam coming, because Sam’s scent had changed ever-so-slightly: it’d taken on a scorched tinge, like burnt sugar. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but Dean didn’t know whether that was just because Sam wanted him around, while the demon had thought of them as enemies.

The door creaked behind Dean as it opened, but he continued to sew up Luther’s wounds like he hadn’t noticed. The best thing for now was probably to act as if Sam was normal and hope for a chance to catch him off-guard. And then…and then Dean had an idea of what ‘and then’ would be, but he couldn’t think of it without feeling even more ill.

“Meg’s not dead. She got away,” Sam said, voice boiling over. The room heated up several degrees, then abruptly cooled. “Not that far, though. How’s he doing?”

“He’s awake.” That came out curt. Hopefully Sam took it as just Dean’s usual hostility towards Luther.

Sam walked towards them, then detoured at the last moment to hunker down beside Dean. Like he’d done a zillion times before, he casually put his hand on Dean’s shoulder. It felt like a red-hot clamp had come down. “The manacles are still on.”

“Some bones in my wrists are broken,” Luther said. He couldn’t entirely keep his wariness and fear out of his voice. When Sam lifted a hand towards him, he flinched.

After a moment, Sam put his hand down on the floor for balance as he leaned over to take in Luther’s back. The fingers he had on Dean’s shoulder pressed down a fraction more as he did. It felt like he was branding Dean, conveying a warning and a reminder about where they all stood in relation to each other.

“I’m too tired right now,” Sam finally muttered, mostly talking to himself. “And I’m so _pissed off_ , I—I’d probably rip off your hands if I tried to make the cuffs break themselves open.”

“I can try to pick them. Just let me finish these first. Go to bed, man. You really need it.” Getting Sam to sleep first would be a good idea. Especially since Dean could feel dawn coming on fast, and once the day started, he wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing because he’d be goddamn sleeping. He couldn’t afford that anymore.

Sam h’mmed an assent. He watched Dean for a while, then turned back and stretched out his hand to feather two fingers over the bruises on Luther’s jaw. Luther held himself back from reacting for about a minute, but the effort had him trembling worse and worse, and finally, he just couldn’t keep his head from turning into the touch. And then Sam slid his fingers down, curling them into the soft flesh beneath Luther’s chin so Luther’s eyes were forced up to him.

“You _hit_ me,” Sam said, tone deliberate and soft and furious. “You ever do that again and—”

“I didn’t think you could take him yet. They’re a lot stronger here than they were in your time,” Luther quickly interrupted. He lowered his gaze and spoke hesitantly and didn’t resist at all. Of course, he was in a hell of a lot of pain, but that still was some damn good lying.

But Dean wasn’t sure if it’d be convincing enough. And anyway, he just found…well, for once it wasn’t so much Luther that disgusted him as the circumstances, and how they were forcing all of them into the most incredible contortions. Two-faced and irritating as Luther could be, he’d never shown much inclination to be a doormat before, but right now that was the only way to survive. “That’s really self-sacrificing of you.”

“Dean, don’t start.” Sam shot Dean a genuinely annoyed look, then got up. He stifled a yawn as he did. “Look, I’m going to nap in the next room for an hour or so, and then I’ll see about getting some blood for you two. Don’t kill each other. We’re starting after Meg as soon as possible.”

When Sam left, he didn’t quite close the door. Dean looked at it for a while, keeping one ear cocked for Sam’s movements, and then crawled over and nudged it the rest of the way shut when he thought it was safe. Then he went back over to Luther.

“Nice thinking,” Luther mumbled.

“Yeah, but now what? I can’t kill him.” And that wasn’t a matter of ridding the world of evil, or of what Dean wanted, or of doing what was best for Sam or himself. Dean just couldn’t.

He remembered Sam’s white, horrified face in that crappy motel bathroom when Sam had refused to kill him for being a vampire, remembered the sheer force of his brother’s refusal as a near-palpable third presence with them. He’d been a little unfair about that whole episode.

Something else occurred to Dean then. “Why your blood? Why wouldn’t they worry about me? I could make him—” He stopped as he remembered another conversation he and Sam had had.

“Could you? You just—you never did feel right to me,” Luther said. “Strong, and maybe you’re a different kind, but…”

Dean gingerly picked up Luther’s left wrist and turned it so he could check out the hinge and the lock. He didn’t know if he could get the lock picked in the time he had left before sundown, but he probably could at least loosen the cuffs so he could slide them up high enough to set and bandage the wrists. “No, maybe not. I wasn’t exactly…made a vampire the way you’re supposed to be, and then Sam got me halfway turned back to normal before things…interrupted. I’m…” Dean’s mouth wryly twisted “…probably sterile for that.”

Luther snorted a laugh, then cut it off to half-suppress a moan as Dean started to work on the manacles. He laid his head back on the floor and closed his eyes. “Well…Sam probably wouldn’t drink from you anyway. Not that the demon or its helpers know that yet, but…you’re still his brother. He’ll still bend for you.”

But not for much longer; he was making Dean bend now, and it didn’t seem like he was going to stop. It seemed like he liked doing it, like he was going to resort to that more and more often. “Why are you helping with this? You just couldn’t stand being told what to do all the time, or what? Because—” Dean started, voice harsh.

“You like your brother like he is right now?” Luther opened his eyes long enough to shoot Dean a derisive look, then went back to semi-conscious. “Neither do I. I hate demons. I’d hate him if he ended up one. And I liked him enough before to want to do whatever I could to make sure he didn’t turn into one.”

“Liked him.” Dean had to raise his eyebrow at that. And his hackles, even if right now, he preferred Luther’s company to Sam’s.

Shrugging obviously made too many things in Luther hurt for him to try that a second time. When he’d unclamped his teeth from his lip, he said, “Yeah.”

The left cuff finally loosened up, letting Dean shove it back about an inch. He couldn’t feel any bones that were obviously out of place, so the break had to be deep in the wrist. All they could do was leave it be and hope it healed right, so he wrapped up that wrist, splinting it with the handle from a hairbrush he’d found in a drawer, and moved on to the next one.

Luther stirred again. “Dean. It’s not…him anymore. There still might be moments where he’s the same, but those are moments, not the main thing. You—”

“I can’t kill him. I _can’t_.” It sounded a little like an apology. Maybe it was.

Maybe…maybe there still was a little sliver of a chance left. All the stuff Luther had said made sense…but it was still guesswork. Sam hadn’t actually asked to drink Luther’s blood yet. If he didn’t…

Dean clung to that. It was all he had left.

“I guess I’m sharing with you today,” Dean finally muttered, glancing at the bed against the wall.

Luther didn’t reply. He just laughed beneath his breath; the sound was equal parts hysterical and cynically ironic.

* * *

When Sam woke up, he felt oddly bereft and spent several minutes lying in bed trying to figure out why before he realized he was missing something. Dean wasn’t in the room.

And when he went looking, he found Dean in the last place he ever thought he’d find him: stiffly asleep in the same bed as Luther. Both of them seemed out for the count, so Sam went down to the kitchen to work through his shock by turning a couple chickens clucking around in the lot behind the house into converted blood.

He came back up with the blood and set it on a table beside the bed. Then he got a chair from the next room and put that down by the side of the bed, letting the legs thump a bit as they landed. Luther’s eyelids twitched.

“I know you’re awake,” Sam said, sitting down. “And you’ve got to be hungry.”

After another moment, Luther opened his eyes. He was closest to the wall, and judging from the difficulty he had in sitting up, he wasn’t going to be able to reach across Dean. Something clinked as he moved, and then the manacle chain dropped out of the blankets.

Sam picked it up, not missing the way Luther initially moved backward, or the wince Luther made when the cuffs pulled on him. “Dean couldn’t get them off?”

“Dean fell asleep. We were up all night.” Luther normally would’ve done everything he could to avoid touching Dean, but when he needed to put his arms down for support, he laid them right across Dean’s chest. His face had drained of what little blood it had the moment he’d started to move, and now it was varying shades of gray, depending on how much effort he was exerting at a given moment.

Converted chicken blood wasn’t going to do it. As calm as Sam probably seemed right now, inside he was itching to go after Meg. Once they caught up with her, he could tie her down and then find out where the demon was in this time. And then everything would be better. “Yeah. Weird thing is, I feel okay now.”

“You don’t look okay,” Luther muttered. He wanted to say something else, but was holding it back for some reason.

Sam took out a knife and cut a shallow slice across the back of his index finger. He heard Luther suck in a small breath, and he knew that Luther’s eyes had immediately fixed on the blood welling up. Whatever Luther’s problem was, it’d be easy enough to deal with. He was easy enough, when it came down to it.

After shaking a couple more drops of blood into the bowl, Sam started to bind up his finger, but then thought the better of it and offered the finger to Luther. Who instantly pressed his mouth shut and clamped himself in place, because otherwise he obviously would’ve dived for it. He usually did.

“What?” Sam asked, getting exasperated. Then he noticed that the bed was creaking, and glanced down to see Luther kneading Dean’s shoulder and arm. He looked back up in time to see Luther slide backwards, as if there was anywhere for him to go. There wasn’t even a window on that side. “Get off of Dean.”

Sam lunged forward; Luther made the mistake of trying to say something and Sam took the opportunity to shove his finger right into Luther’s mouth. He used his thumb and other fingers to pinch into the blue-black spots on Luther’s jaw so the bastard would hold still. The whole blood-thirst thing would take care of the rest.

And it did, with Luther unable to keep from rubbing his tongue along Sam’s finger for more than a second. The moment he did, his eyes half-closed and he slumped, his tongue carefully probing the cut so it bled more.

“Jesus, you make everything such a big deal. Just when I think I’ve got you figured out, you go and flip everything on me.” After about forty seconds, Sam pulled out his finger and reached back for the bowl. He shoved it at Luther till the irritating prick ducked his head and took a drink. “I don’t know what your deal is, but you’re not going to keep me from going after the demon. I’ve got a chance to make everything-- _everything_ \--right and I’m going to take it.”

“Look, no matter…” Luther paused to awkwardly wipe at his mouth “…no matter how strong you are, the demon is stronger here.”

“And it’s got more like Meg walking around. Yeah, I know—I did a lot of looking around last night,” Sam said. He frowned when this made Luther’s eyes widen, but no further reaction seemed to be coming, so he let it be. “There’s already two or three more heading this way. But I’ve been thinking about that, and I think I’ve got a way around that.”

Luther had been in the process of bending for another drink, but now he lifted his head enough so that it was clear he wasn’t going to take any more. Not of his own accord, and Sam didn’t feel like fighting over that now. Two-thirds of the bowl was gone; Dean could have the rest.

“I…I don’t know how to get back.” The words came a lot easier than the thought had when Sam had finally admitted it to himself. “But if I have the time…but I can still get hurt. They could try hanging me like Brown, couldn’t they? And then there’d be no one to take care of Dean. So I have to make sure I can stick around till it’s all done.”

“Yeah, you’d be hunted. As soon as people figured out what you are,” Luther slowly replied. From watching his face, Sam knew the moment he’d figured out the double meaning of Luther’s words and lost his temper over it.

He sat still for a moment and wondered why the hell everyone was suddenly determined to get in his way now. Then he threw himself at Luther.

Oddly enough, instead of trying to get away, Luther went forward…forward and _down_ , which made sense when he started shaking Dean again. Sam pried him off and forced him back against the bed before Dean woke up. The chair clattered over from a stray blow from Sam’s foot, and he ended up having to get onto the bed, one knee planted on the edge of it while he carefully straddled Dean. He had Luther by the throat, but the manacle chain was still flailing against Sam’s chest, so he switched one hand to hook that.

He let go of Luther’s neck long enough to drag Luther’s arms over his head, then seized his throat again. That finally ended all the struggling.

“So how does this work with your kind of vampire? Do I just need to drink the blood?” he asked. One last chance for Luther to come to his senses.

Wasted effort. Luther stared wildly up at him, the red smears still around his mouth standing vividly out against his bone-white skin. “This can’t be the way,” he hissed.

“Why else would they go after you and not Dean? They wanted to make sure I’d get killed before I could finish. Well, that’s not going to goddamn happen. I’m not going to be stopped again.” Sam started to bend down, then stopped. He’d have to practically gnaw Luther’s throat open, and then that’d be that much more that Luther would have to heal from before they could move. “ _Stop talking_.”

Of course, he could just leave Luther behind because the blood was all Sam really needed, but he found himself reluctant to do so. He’d gotten used him, and he’d already had so many changes in his life…besides, then the demon might get Luther, and Sam wasn’t into giving up _anything_ to it.

After a moment, Sam decided it probably was okay to let go of Luther’s throat. He kept hold of the manacle chain while he reached for his knife…which he’d actually left on the bedside table. With a sigh, Sam made himself concentrate. He was still a little tired and he overshot a little, nearly sending the knife into the wall, but he managed to grab it out of the air just in time. Then he leaned back down.

Luther jerked his head from side-to-side, keeping Sam from doing it. Finally Sam slapped the flat of the blade against the side of Luther’s jaw; that made him stop moving. He waited a moment, then carefully twisted the knife so the edge was pressed into Luther’s skin.

Then he cursed as something bumped into his knee; his hand slipped down to the mattress just before the knife would’ve sank in.

“Sam?” Dean drowsily mumbled. He turned over and peered at them. Then his eyes flew wide open and he yanked himself up the headboard, half-sitting before Sam could stop him. “What the _hell_ \--”

“I’m just discussing what to do next.” Sam started to push himself off the bed, then thought better of it and instead dragged himself further on so most of his weight was on Dean’s legs. He kept the knife in the sheets. “Sorry we woke you.”

Dean didn’t look like he believed that at all. He stayed where he was and glanced at Luther. “Yeah, and?”

“And there are more like Meg coming here. They’ll be here before we can leave, and it’s going to take a while to deal with all of them,” Sam said.

He had had to let go of the chain, so Luther had pulled his hands back down and now had them cradled to his chest. Luther kept himself pressed against the wall, and when Dean looked at him again, he opened his mouth, then bent over in a sudden coughing fit.

“Any ideas, Luther?” Dean pointedly asked after a second. He shot a distrustful look at Sam—at _Sam_.

“Yeah, but he’s not cooperating.” The more Sam watched the two of them, the more the set-up rang wrong to him. It almost seemed like Dean was siding with Luther, of all people, and then there’d been the fact that Dean hadn’t chosen to share a room with Sam. “Look—”

“I just wanna hear Luther talk about what he thinks is so bad about it for once. You know, since he’s always shooting our ideas down for bullshit reasons.” Yeah, it sounded sarcastic and jeering, but Dean’s heart obviously wasn’t in it. He couldn’t look steadily at Sam and he was slowly edging himself so he was between Sam and Luther. “What is the idea, anyway?”

Sam paused. “I go vampiric long enough to get the demon, then turn myself back. And you.”

Dean paled. He swallowed, hard and slow, and his gaze fixed itself on Sam’s face. Then he gave a minute shake of his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“It’ll make sure that I stay alive till it’s all done, and—and look, if I do it right, then maybe I won’t have to change myself back. Maybe I won’t have to change you back, because if we stop the demon here, then you never meet that vampire. Dad’s alive. Jessica’s alive-- _Mom’s_ alive,” Sam said. He put his free hand on Dean’s shoulder, willing Dean to just listen to him. “Come on. Think about it, about what it’d be like.”

“I am. Believe me, I am, but how do you know it’d change anything? Because—look, this all already has happened, Sam. It’s happened and somehow it didn’t work because the demon was around in our time. And you know what? I’m not risking it. I’m not letting you turn into a monster, and—”

Sam’s patience gave out and he snapped. His hand flashed from Dean’s shoulder up to Dean’s neck. The headboard rattled, then began to groan as he pressed Dean against it.

Something moved to the side and Sam briefly let go of Dean’s neck to jerk around and press the knife back to Luther’s throat, stopping him where he was. Then Sam turned back to Dean, who was hopelessly straining against the force holding him back. He managed to get his elbows up and braced against the headboard, but when he tried to lever himself away using them—Sam had to adjust fast to keep Dean from breaking any bones.

“Dean, I’m not a monster—hell, I’m trying to _stop_ one here. I just don’t understand why you can’t see that,” Sam said. He tried to calm down, but the way Dean was glaring at him wasn’t making it that easy.

“Because this isn’t how we do it! Goddamn it, Dad’s not your fault! The last hundred and—and whatever years weren’t your fault. We stopped the demon when we could. We don’t know if we can do anything now to make things better, and I’m not going to lose you over some half-baked chance that we—”

Sam had heard enough. Dean wasn’t going to change his mind till he had proof, and he wasn’t going to get proof unless they did this.

Something in the headboard snapped when Sam upped the pressure on Dean. He winced at doing it, but he couldn’t take care of things while Dean was yelling at him.

Luther still was holding in place, so at least he wasn’t giving Sam any trouble now. He stared a silent plea at Sam, but he had obvious reasons for not liking this, so Sam could ignore him pretty easily. When the blade cut into his skin, his eyes snapped shut.

“Sam…wait, Sammy. I’m—I’m sorry, okay? I just…God, it’s _him_ ,” Dean suddenly said, choking out the words. But it sounded like that was more because of how Sam was forcing him away than because of reluctance or disgust or anything. Actually, Dean sounded desperately eager. “It’s always about him.”

“What?” That startled Sam enough for him to turn away from Luther and let up on Dean.

The moment he did, Dean dropped forward so his head was pressed against Sam’s shoulder. His hands came up a moment later to clutch at Sam’s arms, squeezing and loosening, and then he tipped so he could rub his cheek against Sam’s neck. “If you drink his blood, then it’s just like…he’s that much closer to you. But you’re _my_ brother.”

“Oh…oh, Jesus, _Dean_. God, it’s not going to change that at all, okay? This is just something I have to do. It doesn’t mean anything like that.” Sam glanced at Luther, but he wasn’t moving; he was just lying there with blood trickling down his neck and staring. So Sam figured he could take a moment to wrap an arm around Dean and hug him. “It’s not going to give him an edge over you. I swear.”

“How the hell would you know?” A little bit too much sharpness to Dean’s tone there, but he suddenly lifted his head so Sam was distracted. His eyes anxiously searched Sam’s face. He shifted his hands down so they settled just above Sam’s elbows, and he leaned in a little more so they were barely a hairsbreadth apart. “Sam?”

“Look, I _know_.” Sam pulled his arm up Dean’s back till he could cup the side of Dean’s jaw. He watched Dean nod, eyes closing, and nestle his head further into the touch. But something was still making Dean tense, unsure…Sam stroked Dean’s cheek with the ball of his thumb and Dean relaxed a little more, but not quite enough.

Well…fine, Sam could do a little more. He tilted his head, then took a deep breath and pressed his lips to Dean’s. After a moment, Dean slumped into it and opened his mouth, moaning and sliding his tongue against Sam’s. And then—fingers seizing his hair—Dean’s grip suddenly turning to iron, a sob squeezing out of Dean to get trapped up against Sam’s mouth—a brutal yank and—

_Snap._

* * *

Dean sat up with a gasp, staring around himself. The night was black and cool. Weathered, broken walls ringed him, and no roof was over him when he looked up. His hands were pressed into dirt, and…and he was dressed like somebody living in the twenty-first century.

“Oh…God…”

“Sam?” Dean shakily whispered. The world started to tremble, and after a moment, he realized that that was actually him. He jerked his head around almost convulsively.

Sam…Sam was lying on the ground, dressed like he should be dressed, in the middle of the circle they’d drawn in the ruins of Brown’s store. He was so white there couldn’t have been a drop of blood in his face, and he had his hands clutched protectively around his throat, and he was staring—staring at Dean like—

“God, don’t—we had to! We had to, Sam! It wasn’t you, and I wasn’t—I wasn’t going to let you get taken over like—don’t do anything to me, Sam. We had to,” Dean stammered, scrambling back. He hit a wall and had to stop.

At first Sam seemed confused, but then he got it and his face…he covered it with his hands and rolled onto his back, but not before Dean had gotten a glimpse of some hellish guilt in Sam’s eyes. “Oh, my God. Oh, God. I did that. I did—”

He went still, then yanked his hands down and sat up, twisting around to look in the other corner. Where Luther was, with no blood on him and sprawled in a way he couldn’t possibly have with broken ribs. He looked like he badly needed to throw up.

“…did I?” Sam asked him, voice small and shivering.

Luther flinched. He dropped his gaze. “A year afterward, I was in Lawrence and this vampire I’d never seen before attacked me, saying I’d killed his whole nest in Pawnee. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was so angry he called me out in public and a passing hunter picked up on what we were. Gave me a hell of a month.”

“Oh, Christ.” Sam put his head back in his hands. “Oh, God.”

“But…but we’re okay now. You’re still alive. You’re—you know what can happen now, so you won’t do it, right? It just was some kind of long flashback from our end, like a dream—Sam? Sam?” Dean said. His voice kept cracking on him. He kept cracking up on himself, and in the end he had to wrap his arms around himself so he wouldn’t fall apart. “Sam?”

* * *

God knew how they’d gotten back to the motel. Luther kept falling over, saying something about phantom pains, and Dean had just…just turned into this shattered little kid, constantly asking Sam if it’d be okay. If he was mad at them. And Sam…Sam didn’t know how he was doing. He didn’t even know who the hell he was anymore, or what he was or what he would be.

He did know what he might be now, and it was terrifying and revolting and Jesus Christ, they’d had to _kill_ him. And he could totally understand why. He would’ve done the same thing if…it never should have gotten that far.

He really was the problem. He was the problem—he’d always known that, but they’d all been looking at things from the wrong angle.

“Sam?”

He didn’t turn around, though he did jerk up in surprise. Dawn had been over for about an hour. “Aren’t you getting a burn?”

“It’ll heal,” Luther said. He probably meant to be that biting; he’d alternated between shying away and cornered-animal savage since they’d gotten back. Kind of a tame reaction, all considering. “Dean’s asleep.”

Dean had been crumbling, but he wouldn’t let Sam get nearer than a foot to him. It looked like he wanted Sam to put a hand on his shoulder, or give him a hug, or something, but every time Sam tried, Dean would flinch. It didn’t seem like something Dean could help. Also a pretty lowkey reaction; Dean really should’ve been trying to kill Sam.

“Are you going to keep sitting out here?”

“No,” Sam said. No, he’d made up his mind. He looked down at the silver charm lying in his palm, then closed his fingers around it and tucked it back in his front pants-pocket.

Luther kicked at something: a rock, maybe. “Look, when the flashback ended, we went back to how we were. But…there are more demons besides the one that went after your family.”

“You offering to break my neck again?” Sam glanced over his shoulder. Much to his surprise, Luther didn’t have a gun trained on him or anything like that.

Actually, Luther looked like the one who’d been shot. He really hadn’t enjoyed doing that. He really…Sam mattered to him on some level, for whatever reason. “No…I’m saying that I probably can’t do that again. It was bad enough—so you’re going to have to find some other way. This one isn’t working.”

“Yeah, I kind of noticed,” Sam muttered, turning back around. He stared at the rosy sky. “I’ll be inside in another minute.”

Two minutes passed before Luther finally did spin around and start walking back to the motel room. And that was when Sam reached out and lifted Luther in the air and slammed him against the concrete, just hard enough to keep him down for a while. The parking lot was empty aside from them, so there was no one to see him float Luther back into the motel room.

He stayed outside to get what he needed from the car trunk. He’d been carrying around all that damn stuff for long enough; it was about time he used it.

* * *

“…because I knew how to be a goddamn vampire! I was good at it! I was happy that way!”

“Which completely does nothing to make me sympathize. You had to kill people to survive—now you don’t. Isn’t any part of you a little relieved about that? Or did you like killing people, too?”

“Well, I didn’t _mind_ because I was a vampire. Now I’m human again and how do you think I feel thinking about all of that?”

Dean squeezed his eyes more tightly shut and pressed his head into the pillow, trying to block out the yelling. He had the worst headache…and God, he felt so sick. His stomach was cramping and heaving, and he really needed—really—but he felt so awful. But he needed to puke, and he didn’t want to do it on the bed.

Pride barely won out over nasty bodily functions. He shoved himself up and scrambled for the edge of the mattress, hoping to God that the trashcan would be right there _and it was_. And thank God. And Jesus Christ, the stuff he was throwing up tasted terrible and looked even worse. It looked like…

Hands went around him, steadying him. “Dean? Oh, man…Dean, are you okay?”

The first time Dean tried to speak, his mouth was too clogged up with…chunks, which were so disgusting and he spat like crazy till they were all out.

“He’s just throwing up the last meal he had,” somebody else said. Luther. Luther, sounding amazingly pissed off and…and God, why did the world smell and sound and look so much duller? Fuzzier…more muffled. “Results of playing God, Sam.”

“Well, I can’t do that anymore,” Sam snapped. He rubbed his hand over Dean’s back. When he spoke again, he did so in a much softer voice. “Not ever again.”

“Oh, _now_ you stop. You hypocritical son of a bitch—if this isn’t twisting people around to fit your plans, then I don’t know what is. I don’t know how to be a goddamn person.” Stomping. Door slamming.

Dean started to wipe his mouth, then stopped. A beat later, Sam had handed him a wad of tissues to use. “What…what happened…?”

“You’re human, Dean. I turned you and Luther back, so I can’t make myself into a vampire. And—and I made that charm into a drink and I drank it and now I can’t do anything. I don’t have any powers,” Sam said. Then he took a deep breath. His hand stopped rubbing Dean’s back and tightened so it crumpled up Dean’s shirt. “Dean…I’m so sorry. About everything. I…it all was wrong. What we got wasn’t worth what we had to lose for it.”

Oh. Oh…and for a moment, Dean felt some sense of loss. But it was overshadowed by a growing hope.

He twisted around to look up at Sam. “So…it’s okay now? I can’t get at you anymore? I won’t have to?”

Sam flinched, then pulled Dean up. Dean gratefully wrapped his arms around Sam and reciprocated, pushing his head deep into Sam’s neck. He nodded, slowly running his hand down Dean’s back, and Dean sighed and arched before he really knew what he was doing. Then he stopped…but Sam didn’t back off or anything. He did go stiff, and his hand stopped where it was and didn’t move an inch from the spot, but he didn’t let go.

“Well, it’ll be okay. We can work on it now,” Sam finally said. “Best we can do.”

* * *

_Two Months Later_

The house had seen better days, but it’d been repaired about as well as it could be. The lawn was neat and the line of red brick dust ringing the house looked like part of the landscaping. All the windows were dark, so Sam went around to the back.

Luther was sitting cross-legged on the porch there, making braids out of corn leaves. This was the Midwest, so those could’ve been for dolls against any number of nighttime monsters. He glanced up when Sam came around the corner, then went back to work. The muscle in his jaw regularly twitched.

“You’ve got a tan,” Sam said.

“You’re here because you want me to fuck your brother, or to fuck you, and that way, you two don’t have to fuck each other. Because old habits die hard, right?” Well…Luther still was mad at Sam, apparently.

Sam ducked back around the corner; out front, Dean was poking at one of the windowsills, probably at the protective sigils carved into it. He looked up and gestured for Sam to come back already, and he wasn’t entirely kidding about it. He wasn’t too fond of this whole idea, but he’d been the one to track Luther down in the first place, so he got why they had to.

“You’re not doing too badly at being human.” Or at hunting, which wasn’t too surprising. “Look, you know why I did it. I couldn’t leave the possibility open.”

“Just because I know doesn’t mean I have to like it. Why didn’t you kill me instead? That would’ve worked, too,” Luther muttered. “Oh, no, maybe you’re here because you need somebody to play the dad—after all, you two only really lost it after that.”

For a moment, Sam missed being able to toss people through the air. Then he ruthlessly crushed that feeling and just tried to relax enough to unlock his jaw. He’d forgotten what a bastard Luther could be when he wanted to. “I’m here because things ended, but that doesn’t mean they never happened. Or that their consequences went away. You know so much, you have to know that—I mean, you’re in goddamn _Lawrence_. How stupid is that?”

“Really stupid,” Luther sighed. His fingers slowed, then stopped and he finally let the half-done braid slip to the ground. He lifted his head, but to stare out past Sam.

He’d drank Sam’s blood, and Dean’s blood. Dean had fed off of him. And then there’d been everything else. They were all tangled up in each other now, connected in ways that were twisted and backwards and forever raw, and some magic wasn’t going to make that go away. Moving on wasn’t impossible—hard, but not impossible, but getting away from each other was.

“I read up on flashbacks and time warps. Sounds like what we had was a flashback where we weren’t fully there—we doubled up, or something.” Luther started to get up just as Sam put his foot on the stairs. He was standing by the time Sam got to the top. “You know, this isn’t much healthier than before.”

“But this’ll work,” Sam said. He leaned in, and it seemed like Luther’s reaction to that was lingering on; the other man went very still, then gradually reciprocated.

And then when it was warming up, Luther abruptly broke it off to get the back door. “How’s Dean?”

“A mess,” Sam honestly answered. The public side of his brother was mostly back to normal, but in private it was a garden of boobytraps. Not that Sam was much better, really. “Look, that was just…kind of…it wasn’t to convince you or anything. I just wanted to see what it was like…you know, when I wasn’t doing it to make you do something. So I’d know the difference. We’ll leave if you ask us to.”

Luther paused, then finished opening the door. “But you’ll come back.” He pushed his hand through some stray locks hanging in his face, then tucked them behind his ear. “Sam? Get out of here.”

Sam stared at the other man for a moment. He’d thought he’d get at least a little…never mind, he’d said—he’d said he’d go. And he needed to actually start giving in, and stop thinking about how he could push harder to get his way.

He backed down a step, then turned around.

“Get back here. And tell Dean to stop poking at my damn windows,” Luther snorted. He left the door open when he walked inside. “Messed up? Well, that’ll fit right in with the rest of the house…”


End file.
